1KHO 800: Read to Your Kids As Long As They Will Let You | Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Enchanted Hour

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Honestly during a packed summer having one less daily chore to think about makes a huge difference. Maintain your cat's litter while focusing on your growing family. Learn more about Whiskers Litter Robot models and starter kits today to get set up before the summer craziness arrives. Take an additional $50 off bundles with code 1000 hours when you shop whisker.com slash 1000 hours. That's an additional $50 off bundles with code 1000 hours at whisker.com slash 1000 hours. I'm the founder of 1000 hours outside and you are in for a treat today because for so many people this is such a transformative favorite book of theirs. It is called The Enchanted Hour, The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction and wouldn't you know the author? Megan Foxgarden is here. Megan I'm just so thrilled you're here. Thanks for saying yes. Okay I kind of want to yell at you like a thank you little one. I'm gonna say this is what a book. What a book Megan to like give people the permission to slow down but also to like guide them through and to say this is one of the best things that you could ever do. You could ever do and for so many reasons. So I would love if you would give us a little bit of your backstory. You know you grow. I really actually if you wouldn't mind starting at the party. You talk about this party that you are at. This is before you have kids. You got this party and the what do they call the person the host that you know the wife. All of a sudden she's gone and you're like well where is she? Could you tell us that story that kind of was a little bit start for you? Yeah absolutely. I mean this was my little like my awakening moment. I was not I think we were engaged but not married at this point. Certainly didn't have any children and my husband and I went to this party hosted by an old friend of mine who had started having babies early and she had kind of scandalized everyone because she got married early and had babies early and like what's she doing and there were a world standing around with our drinks chat chat chat and suddenly you know how there's always a there's a kind of sequence like you you have a drink you chat the energy is up and then it's like time to go through for dinner but the call to go through for dinner didn't come and we realized that my friend was not in the room anymore. She'd been actually gone a while and so we said to her husband Kirk where's Lisa and he said oh she's just reading to the boys and he just it was just like this radicalizing moment because there were several things that told me but the most important was that this is a non it's a thing that is so important in family life that it's just the thing you do first it's the highest priority in family life was to read to the boys so you had a house full of guests say they can handle themselves they can have a second drink whatever but the principal thing that she was doing was reading to her boys and at that moment I felt this like deep conviction I thought boy if I ever have children um that's what I'm gonna do I'm gonna put reading aloud first and lo and behold I did have children um just as many as you do which I'm really happy about and I read like a like a fanatic to all of them every night and you know often honestly it was for an hour sometimes it was longer sometimes it was less I mean I'm not perfect it didn't was it always enchanted sometimes it was a little chaotic but um you know it just was the thing it was it was like the through line that carried me through before I had children it almost taught me how to be with children reading to them because you could see them respond to things you it'll it just put you in tune with them you know to to read to them when they were I mean I started with my first one when she I brought her home from the hospital it was the first thing I did I was come on there I write about this in the book you might remember it was a kind of humiliating moment in a way I I brought her home and you we all have that feeling with the first child like oh my goodness I'm really responsible for this other person and your software is being rewritten and all your feelings are confused and I didn't know what to do except I knew to read to this child so I sat down in a rocking chair and I opened up Grimm's fairy tales and I began reading to my newborn and I thought what am I doing she can't even understand any of this she doesn't speak English yet you know and I cried my husband was very sweet about it anyway but it was it was like a it was a way so it was the fulfillment of that moment at that party where I thought if I ever have children I will read to them and I did and so that and and from that came the enchanted hour wow for decades decades of nightly reading to your children what you saw for that for that host for Lisa is a non-negotiable it was you know because you would think oh I'm just gonna skip it tonight I've got this party but no she still went and did it and I love what you wrote about in the book about the baby you're like the baby did not seem to be aware of what was happening was she even listening was I supposed to show her the pictures wait is she is is she asleep what kind of maniac reads Cinderella to a newborn but you start and and then what you talk about in this book and it is so wonderful it's like such a relief to read it you talk about everything from the cuddling together and how the parental voice you know even if they're not speaking English yet you know they're not speaking is so important for their neurological development you know everything from brain waves to comfort to attunement um and then and then all the way through life like maybe you're going to read to someone when they're in the hospital you know so it just encompasses so much so I would love to kick it off with this this wonderful news this wonderful news that opening up a book can transform a child's brain more robust activation a whole bouquet of neurochemicals it seems too simple making I know doesn't it but it's the one of the most human things that we can do I mean as we know right storytelling and the participation in story listening storytelling is in fact one of the human universals I think there are seven of them it's just in every society ever recorded or documented there is storytelling it's it's just it's very deep in the human self and so and so we have a natural a natural affinity for it a natural response to it and so you know we I think that if you were a spectacular storyteller you could probably achieve a lot of these same ends um just telling stories but you know we have the medium of the book and the book allows us to enter into the imagination of generations and generations and hundreds of years of other people's thinking and imagination and so it's a wonderful I think wonderful mechanism for bringing together all these elements that contribute to human flourishing you know connection language a language is very important I mean you know we we are seeing I think in our culture where there's some you know some diminishment of people's appreciation for reading for language the numbers are dropping a little in this um but you know language to have us develop a facility with language allows a child to express their thoughts their feelings that allows them to interact with what it's an extremely useful thing you know speech is something that we have over the other animals and um you know it's worth keeping and so um so I think all of these all of these things come to bear when we sit together and as you mentioned there is there are kind of chemical shifts that take place there's also one there's a study a long time ago and I do I prefer to it in the book but I didn't go into in great detail um we're essentially if if people are sitting in a group and one person is reading aloud let's say let's say it's a teacher to a class which is a wonderful way for this to happen um it's so fruitful that the brain patterns if if they're monitored the sort of synchronicity of the brains no I'm getting my words mixed up here what I mean is the brain activities um of the reader and listener synchronize so it's like everyone's having not exactly the same experience because you know when you when you bring things to mind in your inner in your inner eye as it were yours what you think of is going to be different from the person next to you but all of this kind of imaginative entry is taking place at the same time at the same pace and that by the way Jenny is one of the great things about reading aloud in a group and I think it works really well with if you have a family um it can work in a multi-age mixed gathering let's say over Christmas or Thanksgiving or something when you have a lot of people in the house it also works in the classroom is that everybody at every level gets the story at the same time and they so they experience a story which is a kind of individual thing but they experience it as a as a group activity with all of the kind of the pleasure of community that comes from that you know that feeling of connection to others and you I mean I think of the book over and over again I think of books as almost like a a meeting point or a place a bridge or something um I definitely do write about how in adolescence I found it was with my children not my adolescents but my children's adolescence reading with them every night was a way for us to connect when it was harder especially my son you know he's I mean I was a middle-aged lady by that point and he he was a teenage boy like what do we have in common really but when we read a story together wow we were together you know we're in this little pool of light reading one story and and we were it was like I went came up on my side of the bridge he came up on his side of the bridge I read he listened but we were together and so it's they're just they're they're they're wonderful tools for all of these things what incredible science no like that your brain's almost like sync up you know that's what's happening I think it happens when people sing together you know there's just a couple different times and that happens and so like you said it's like you got the scatter day everyone's doing all these different things and so to come together in the evening and now you do say anytime any place are you on the subway is it breakfast wherever you can do it you know read the books but this is going to not only help them long-term in life in fact studies show more than even having elite private schooling education reading out loud I mean yeah yeah yeah but then also you're going to connect yeah right and it gets you early so yeah so elite private school education that's all very fine it's wonderful to be exposed to great literature and poetry and whatnot through that but in the home when somebody is young if he starts early you know language acquisition vocabulary acquisition um is it it's a it's a it's a cumulative process and um and so the more you start out with the easier it is for you to acquire more language on top of it so you know teachers will and also there are all these other these other behaviors that go along with it like like um that so you alluded to this kind of chaotic rush to the end of the day and I think that was really important because sometimes I would think oh gosh I gotta get to reading aloud and it seemed like this kind of almost like a this is like tower I had to climb up on um but boy once you got there it was oh this was the moment this was when everybody and and you could see it wasn't just me it was everybody else everybody sort of could relax into the story at the end of the day and all of these all of these comforts took place and all of this enhancement flourishing took place um without any really any effort on part of any of the listeners and um yeah um sorry I left my train of thought there excuse me you're gonna have to edit me just I love it I love it though you come together at the end of the day and everybody sort of has this exhale and you and you get to come together and not only are you you know cuddled up and you know you're bonding but you oh you're really setting your kids up for success like you had a a statistic about how like age four attention span actually like they can extrapolate that out and actually this affects a lot of things so but then you also say like if you're like feeling like you're too late anytime anyplace start anytime oh 100 yeah that's right and I think that's that's really it's really important for parents to recognize and people have a lot of ideas about things and they may or may not be right it doesn't I mean it's fine you know but you don't have to be like a skilled thespian you don't have to be able to do all the funny voices to read a read a book aloud you don't have to be you don't have to be enormously expressive it's nice if you are children like it but you don't have to be you don't you don't have to I mean you don't you don't even have to be very good at reading your own like if english is for you a foreign language you can use picture books and tell stories about those in your own language like you there are all sorts of ways you can interact with books and make them the the point at which you infuse your children and we're talking here only about children we could talk about others with all of these fine things and something else I wanted to mention is that you know among the behaviors you know you get to the top of that tower I think in the book I described it as a lifeboat at the end of the day you kind of clamor onto the lifeboat you're all spattered with water and food and uh-huh you know it's been chaotic but then you get there and then you're now you're safe and you're spabbing and you're okay um and part of that lovely relaxing into that experience is you're habituating your children to these very helpful things like paying attention produces pleasant outcomes so it kind of teaches attention it they practice attention I mean not obviously there are variations amongst children um but there's that there's that there's the the calm the calm receptivity of it the the opening of the mind and the imagination the attention to language and having language transform in the mind into pictures um you know learning to follow also I think this this is is it can't possibly be overstated how valuable the language of books is for the developing mind because um books you know occasion language that we don't normally you know what do we talk about when we talk to when we're talking to a toddler like hi how you doing come on over here sit down I was with a toddler yesterday and I was like goose you know because we saw goose you know that's all I said over and I was like goose you know honk yeah but you know a picture book about a goose will have more attributes to the goose that you might than you might say and so just by exposing a child to the language of books starting with picture books but moving on to chapter books and more malt writing you're just giving them so much more language and with the language they will develop um you know they develop an awareness of the rules of the grammatical road is I think the term I use somewhere for it um you know just syntax language use um subject verb agreement it all of those kind of all of those things that have to be learned um and you know teachers will tell you that they can tell the well-read two children from the non-read well-read two children and look I'm not a teacher but I can tell it too I've read aloud in classrooms one time it's actually kind of heartbreaking Jenny because the children who are not read to they're like they're like starving they're like they're like famished those are the children who don't know to sit in the circle and wait till you show them the picture or whatever and they because they know the story is going to come they have not been habituated to that those are the children who push forward and they almost want to climb into the book they want to get in your lap they want they just they can't believe it someone is reading to them it's it's a pleasure they haven't maybe tasted very often before and you can tell almost from their disruptive and they'll barge into the front and get in front of the other kids because because they so they so long to be um to they're like little plants this is not an analogy of my own this is um Philip Pullman the novelist uses this analogy about reading to children that that they won't die without it but they will bloom with it you know they're like their their imaginations will flourish because of it yeah i've seen it with play i've been places like you know a little playground in a school bus pulls up and you know you like some of these kids get out and you're like oh there's the one that's been starving for movement or starving to get outside and so you talk about that this is it's called the word gap the unforgiving math of a phenomenon phenomenon called the word gap and it makes sense because if you have more language then you can understand more and then it starts to kind of a stack on top of each other word rich students gather more words with each passing year and then they start to pull ahead and so you talk about this is really great even just one book a day is over 200 000 words of text in a year and you gave some really cool examples like it's such a reminder like you were just talking about you know goose versus looking at one picture you talk about one picture in this book here's what it contains an amazing number of elements a mother a baby a hammock a trunk a tusk a butterfly flowers palm trees birds mountains and the colors green red gray and yellow in one picture you say and then you can talk about the cover what's on the cover what's in the back cover you know what's the end papers why did they choose those are they trying to make a mood and then you said even in like a seven minute story like babar here's the words fond satisfied elegant learned becoming progress marabou bird scold promises calamity funeral quavering proposal splendid dromedary i mean who says dromedary or or or or or or a gorgeous yellow balloon and it does you know i actually just yesterday i was interviewing this author and i have this happening often where i'm like okay i've read a word but i've actually never said it you know so this author and he's like a pretty famous author and he had the word in his book immemorial and i never said it out loud and i stumbled over it's like immorial he was like i think it's immemorial now it's like oh yeah there's two m's there but you can just see how the the written word is so much more elaborate than goose honk yeah well right and there is also this idea of of our expressive vocabulary versus our receptive vocabulary so and this is important jenny because so you and i are talking to each other and we are therefore we are using our expressive vocabulary okay dromedary it's come up we've now said it twice so it is it is in our expressive vocabulary the word dromedary but but um it's certainly in our receptive vocabulary our receptive vocabulary is for everybody but especially for children um no probably for everybody just vastly greater than our expressive vocabulary if you listen to people let's say you eavesdropping in a restaurant or something you hear people talking you're just not going to hear a lot of esoteric language people are choosing you know words of very common understanding to convey things to each other and and you get sort of more nuanced language in in books um and that's exactly right so children can stack their um and presumably they can grow their expressive vocabulary by growing their receptive vocabulary but it is apparently i believe it's up until um eighth grade yeah eighth grade that's it yeah up until eighth grade they they're and and now i think that you know it's it's possible that there are some people for whom that is eighth grade is is maybe just an early point and they will be later but you start getting it's only then that you start getting language from you know on your own from reading let's say but little children i mean teachers speak in very simple language parents speak in very simple language if they're going to get the complicated language that is really going to help them master their own tongue allow them to speak english or spanish or whatever does they speak they need to be exposed to the words and we're the people who teach them this time of year in homeschooling is really special you're wrapping up projects looking at how far your kids have come and helping them finish strong it's also a great moment to reinforce key skills and build confidence as you head into summer and as routines start to shift with travel camps and more time outside it helps to have something that keeps learning steady without over complicating your days that's where ixl can be such a helpful tool ixl is an award-winning online learning platform that fits seamlessly into homeschooling it offers interactive practice across math language arts science and social studies from pre-k through 12th grade it personalizes learning for each child keeps them engaged and gives parents clear insight into progress what stands out is the real-time feedback and progress tracking kids get immediate explanations as they go and you can clearly see growth over time what's clicking and where a little reinforcement can go a long way it's a simple way to finish the year strong and keep skills fresh heading into the summer make an impact on your child's learning get ixl now and 1 000 hours outside listeners can get an exclusive 20 off ixl membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash 1000 hours visit ixl.com slash 1000 hours to get the most effective learning program out there at the best price you know it's also true right that by by reading them out loud we are as in the case of immemorial for you we're modeling for them how the words are said and it made sometimes i mean certainly there are cases where you come across a word and you think what the heck is that so one of my favorite words which i learned from reading um legend of sleepy hollow is the word rantapole the word rantapole now right you know rantapole what is a rantapole is it a what even part of speech is that so a rantapole is a it's a boisterous youth but it's like a extremely antiquated term nobody says rantapole now i feel like dromedary and rantapole we have to get them back into circulation um you know that's that's the kind of that's the kind of word i simply would never have encountered i myself had never encountered i'm a pretty well read person i'd never seen that word before but it was when i was reading out loud that i even noticed the word we looked it up and now we use it's a family word now you know in the way of these things oh and i love that you talk about that there's so much to talk about you know that you have these little inside it's not even a joke it's just like an inside thing that you know collectively you all know like nobody else knows what that word is yeah yeah i love that's the intimacy of those family words yes yes every family has them and they come from many sources but we got a lot of them from books and i think that's what happens in read aloud families they they have those things in common yeah um there's a line that we use a lot in our family which is uh i'm all alone in the moon um which is when when you feel like yeah you just feel all i'm all alone in the moon it's from piglet from winning the poo oh and i love that yes it's just a continued connection and a different level of understanding of each other so you talk about this in the book the book is called the enchanted hour every family should read it a child's receptive vocabulary the words that he understands is thought to be anywhere from one to three years ahead of his expressive vocabulary the words he can use that and they don't really catch up often until about the eighth grade i wanted to just kind of continue just a little bit more on attention especially in in age of technology where you say there are encouraged the okay you call it this the virtuous behavioral cycle if they sit still and are quite they get to hear the story and they get to enjoy it so you say when it comes to paying attention children from read aloud families go to school with a triple advantage they're used to listening so it's easy for them to do it they've heard lots of language so their comprehension will be comparatively and they know from experience that paying attention brings rewards these assets are not trivial and yet we have a whole generation being trained for shorter attention spans that's what the president of simon and shuster like the book company said they don't even have the attention span often for what a book requires so can you talk about there was a study that was in this book and if you don't remember all the details i can remind because i know you've written it a while ago and also it's like been translated into every single language pretty much that's out there i mean it's such a fantastic book but there was a study where they were looking at the brains of these children basically first it was like watching something versus listening do you know which one i'm talking about oh absolutely okay can you tell us about it yeah so this was a wonderful study done by a guy called john hutton dr john hutton out in sincenady children's hospital and he and his colleagues wanted to see sort of what what was happening in the brains of children and this is again as you mentioned this book came out in 2019 so they're probably they're maybe more sophisticated techniques now um but this was a wonderful vindication of everything that we believe in how you can sort of see on the outside of children they could see on the inside of children so what they did is they put a cohort of four-year-olds through an fmri machine and they looked at the patterns of brain activity when under three circumstances um so and they they by the way they were four-year-old so they were little but they were a lot of the more girls because they stay still more easily in an mri machine i mean anyone who's at an mri it's like not a nice experience and actually dr hutton put me through his mri so i got to have the experience and um it was hard for me to stay still but um and a little nervy i was like afraid like what if i make a mistake probably you know there's there's that daunting element but um but they're essentially they looked at these children and to see what was happening in under three conditions one was when when the children were just listening to a story now these are little children so they're they're they're they're they're their their library of mental images is going to be necessarily smaller than the library of an older child's mental image so so when they were the first condition was they were just in the machine listening to a story out loud it was a recorded story um then the second was when they were listening to a story and seeing still pictures um they actually the books that they used for this were books by the canadian writer robert monk um m un s ch um he did that book love you forever which is i banned it for life i will never look at that it makes me cry just the side of the book i cannot have it in my house people give it to me sometimes i will not have it um but uh so so there was the first condition i'm sorry making this long winded but um the first condition is just uh listening to the story the second is listening to the story while looking at still pictures which is very similar to a like a a picture book read aloud and the third was an animated video of the story and what the researchers found dr hudden and his and his colleagues found was that with the first condition which is just the voice with these little four year olds that there was a little brain activity but not not a huge amount because they were just they were it was probably a little distracting whatnot but they didn't have these mental images um with the uh with the second situation where they were looking at still pictures and listening to a story all the brain domains began to kind of communicate with each other all of these all of the the messages were going back and forth between you know visualization and and and and auditory function and such and then and then the third circumstance which was children watching a video which is you know realistically what a lot of children do a lot of the time is they they watch moving things you know what was happening in their brains jenny nothing nothing was happening in their brains their brains it was going too fast for them so they got their note there was there was one part that was activated i think it was visual recognition just the visual yeah just visual so you could see the shock and all like well something's happening but there was no time for the child's developing brain to kind of put things together you know if you if you if you and i we know what a what what a duck is so if someone says to us duck we have a mental image of a duck so a four-year-old might or might not have a mental image of a duck but if a four-year-old is here's the word duck and sees a picture of the duck there's a process taking place it's not instantaneous so what what the study what what the study found was that the ideal condition for brain activity in four-year-olds is reading a picture book to them so the pictures are not jumping around they have time for their brain to process what they're seeing and hearing they have all of those other things we talked about like the coziness of an adult and also the responsiveness of an adult who's right there listening to them and you know following up on them and attentive to whether or not they need to be directed or have anything explained so yes so so it was a wonderful scientific valentine validation of the thing that those of us who love to read to children because we see what it does to children of what we do and and and it's also great you know if you if you're one of those moms as I was I am who kind of discouraged the watching of television and videos and such it's also validation for you because you're trying you know it's not going to kill anyone to watch a video but you're also losing time like you're not developing and that's what that's important with young children you know they sleep a lot they're awake less than we are awake so we can afford to waste more of our time in a way than they can afford to waste of theirs right and I mean this is their explosive growth time this is the unforgiving math of the word gap so okay so you talk about and you can just I loved reading about it in your book the enchanted hour because you can just envision it you're like okay you know when the kid is looking at these pictures and they're hearing the story there's like basically stuff going on all over the brain and it's connecting and you know and then all of a sudden they put on the video and it just like you know yeah it basically looks like it flatlined all the red colors had turned blue the brain seems like it stops doing anything at all and there is still a little bit of the visual because they are watching yeah then they you know it's like there's the chance that they're going to become more dependent on stuff being fed to them passively nothing pretty much is happening in their heads when they're watching the video and so you say this you know that there's optimal patterns of brain development that can happen there's stronger parent-child relationships there's skills that lasted lifetime if reading a lot were a pill every child in the country would get a prescription instead we're giving them screens yeah I think actually I think actually my my particular passionate cause and your particular passionate cause work really well together because I think being outside and experiencing physical play and activity and the great sky above you and all of the soothing elements of nature and activity and you know using your body you're doing that during the day coming in and reading at night that's just about a that's those are like the perfect conditions it's like the prescription it's the prescription yeah get some sunshine some exercise and some story yeah from someone who loves you yeah and you know jenny there's one other thing I'd like to say if I may you know we do talk a lot about reading aloud in the context of young children because it's so important for young children but as you alluded to earlier it's really something that can be done at at all stages of life it is a relationship enhancer at all stages of life and it's a wonderful point of connection at all stages of life um when my mother was dying a couple years ago um I read to her and she loved it I read her the wind in the willows and she loved but I also read her um that Rudyard Kipling's just so stories and my mother was born in South Africa but moved here when she was a teenager um and she hadn't heard Rudyard Kipling's just so stories since she was a little girl in South Africa when her mother read it to her and then she must have read them to me when I was a child or gave me a book I don't know if she read them to me or not I don't have any memory of that and um and then I read them to my children and then so there was this like almost this wonderful kind of connection through time and generations so when I her daughter read her the book that her mother had read her it was very moving for her it was very moving for me too was so so here's my mom she's afflicted she's on the skids she's on her way out of this world and we had this magnificent point of connection before she left so I really I really recommend I think there are circumstances in which reading aloud is difficult if somebody is deaf for instance it's quite difficult to read to them um you know that just is or if somebody has autism and can't sit still it can be difficult to connect them and these are these are hard circumstances but you know in the case of with elderly people um reading aloud has been shown to be very efficacious for people even suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's and such that it's a way it can it can unlock something in people so particularly in the case as with my mother of the Kipling my mom didn't have Alzheimer's but you know something a story from from their own childhood can be such a gift to somebody on the far end of life um to have it given to them you know I think I wrote this I certainly think about this a lot when when you read aloud to someone I mean it really is it is an act of generosity and love you're you're lifting words off the page and you are bringing them into the air and you're like it's like a balloon and you're popping you're sending them over to a person you love and these so you're you're it's like you're it's like a it's like an invisible caress you're using your voice to to lift a piece of work of a work of art off the page and give it to someone in a way that's very easy for them to receive it goes right in through the ears you know speech is natural to people speech is normal it's our native language as Dante said reading is you know it's it's it's it's a wonderful thing that humans can read but um you know it takes a lot of study to be able to read and it's almost like you short circuit that for the for the person you're giving the gift of reading aloud to if you're reading to them they don't have to do the decoding from the page they can just sit and take in the story and feel that invisible caress you know it's a really so it's it's got all these great side effects but it's also just a beautiful human thing to do oh and don't we want to do beautiful human things goodness in the age of AI you know you talk about that you have the secret society then like with the people that you're reading to because you've shared these experiences and some of that you quoted in the book said kind of like what you're talking about with roger kippling that this was a man he said it gave me a nightly experience to reconnect nightly reading gave me a chance to reconnect with the books I loved as a boy and I love that you wrote about in the enchanted hour megan like I I mean you wrote you give a statistic like it's usually around age five that we kind of stop doing this and kids you know there's statistics like they want their parents to keep reading to them but I would never have considered this act of reading together as adults and you're like it actually used to be super normal like Charles Dickens did it it was actually considered odd to read to yourself and so you talked about like all right when someone there's a chapter called from the nursery to the nursing home and you said this it is really hard to sit with a person in a hospital they are going through so much and it feels like there's nothing to talk about except their medical situation and so this reading aloud it just gives you an opportunity to do something different and imagine and and I could imagine that if they did the MRI machine um on on someone who's in the hospital you know that there's probably the different parts of the brain light up then too you know hope and interest and excitement and you know as opposed to just sort of this drudgery of what's wrong can you talk about teens too as one other group of you know the book is like this is not just for small children of course it's very important for small children but you say that when you talk about reading out loud about teens that people push back and you gave the example of when you read outsiders to a bunch of eighth graders um yeah so with with teenagers of course this is where you mentioned at the very beginning like you know you can read anywhere you can read in the read a breakfast read it whatever so I think that I think there's probably a natural process by which teenagers don't want to be you know they don't want to be baby to a certain point they don't look where you don't want to sit with your mom you don't want to sit with the younger you know the younger siblings necessarily although it's very interesting I saw and perhaps you see and I think a lot of mothers of larger families see this that they'll read to the little ones and the older ones will sort of hover on the outside like yeah I'm too cool to like play attention to the story but I love that page you know I love that picture um so so there's there's a I think we have to be a little forgiving you know I mean you you can't compel people to listen to your read it can it might feel a little too much like you know being being babied and the teenagers that's odious for them so what I recommend and what I did myself is to bring it into different times of the day so I used to read I had some teenagers who had to had to catch a carpool at a certain point in the morning and and I would come down while they were you know they're slumping around the kitchen you know hating everything and I would read to them and and there was one in particular she was the first daughter of mine to sort of leave the reading circle she she kind of didn't want she wanted to be independent more than the others I think probably but she was the one who liked that the most she just loved it it was like she experienced it as not as overbearing maternal involvement but as a kind of you know a gift like a free thing in the morning like oh I'm gonna eat my cereal and I get to listen to you know William Stagg's story out loud um and I and I also would really like to recommend I know I alluded to this earlier but with my son um you know when he was a teenager he had he had very much grown up in the tradition with our family reading aloud um he was a very enthusiastic listener you know really loved the stories kind of grew up with Treasure Island you know read it we read it every year and he just loved it but then you know he didn't want to be with this so I have four girls and one boy and and I think you know in that natural teenage way he didn't really want to be cuddled up with his sisters like there was something kind of not cool about that but he would still sit with me and as long as he would do it we would come after dinner I would read to the girls and I would come down with and he'd have his special like grown-up time and we would sit on the sofa in my office and I would read it aloud to him and you know and I remember noticing like he didn't always want to sit right next to me like he would sit like 1.5 inches away or something I'm independent but and I don't mean to mock him I think it's very normal that you would feel that way and but but we were able to connect through these stories and we kept it going and it was and then when it came to an end you know unfortunately it does come to an end for most of us not I mean there are heroic stories I think the New York Times had a guy the couple years ago who had was still reading to his daughter every night and she was in college but she would call him and they would read you know so some people you know that's great my feeling is read to them as long as they will let you in any circumstance that you can make it happen I do think that reading in the bath can be very helpful if you have a bunch of little kids that at the same time that can be very useful actually one of our we have this beautiful edition of the Chronicles of Narnia beautiful hardcover edition and the voyage of the Dawn Treader has really wavy pages because it went into the bath. Anytime anyplace yeah that's right you're prepared to air out your books I want to read what you wrote you have you are such an incredible writer I'm going to read a couple things this is actually from the introduction of the book family life can be a hectic and flailing business sometimes it's a struggle to keep everyone afloat let alone haul them onto a read aloud raft at bedtime it's just such a great way to go the raft here's what you talk about for teens reading every day or close to it takes discipline when children are little it takes a real act of will as they get older and other claims begin to enroute encroach up on the time they have at home schoolwork sports friends part-time jobs and the temptations of technology will try to crowd out regular reading don't let it this is a battle worth winning making the time to read together is almost an obstinate act of love and then you talked about I don't know if it was you but in um I ended I got a couple new books after reading yours and you've got book lists in here too but you talked about for eighth graders reading the end of I've not read outsiders but you say when pony boy reads Johnny's letter at the end of the outsiders you can hear a pin drop this someone else said this yes that's right that's a teacher yeah yeah they were reading and they said you can hear pin drop like they don't discount this and actually you know talking about that preteen teen age you talked about your daughter flora and she's 11 so in that preteen age and you read Dracula I know I think back on that now I think how did how did we pull that off but I think I was I was really good at reading aloud by that point but I'm maybe a little rusty now but I could I pulled off all these crazy accents she was riveted she was absolutely riveted it's a really scary book but it's also it's very antiquated language I mean it was written 1898 I think it came out you know it's um and it's also it's like one of those but yeah but if you if you if you if you train them up in books they will be the that it's all accessible to them I think um there were some books I know that we bailed on over the years and flora and I never we could never I'm afraid we could never make Tolkien work for us we tried the Lord of the Rings it just couldn't it just didn't get any traction for us we just couldn't make it happen um I also years ago tried to read um uh 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and also the Swiss family Robinson to my two eldest and um and we everyone got I mean the thing about Swiss family Robinson is it's kind of a wishful fulfillment story so this family they're washed up on an island but then and they don't have anything then very conveniently there's like all the contents of a shipwreck so they're like hmm you know what I could really use is I could use some nice bacon from a barrel why look there's a barrel on that you know so I can see how the book would have worked you know and maybe in a previous previous um you know era but we couldn't we we just all just thought this is just ridiculous like oh what I really need is a shifu robe right now oh look there's a shifu robe but I love that you brought that up because one of the books that my nine-year-old daughter carries around with her everywhere is Swiss family Robinson so yeah to each their own right it's like and you know bail on the ones because there'd be people listening that big we love Tolkien you know yeah some people I'll be like you know you brought up I just brought up outsiders I'm like we didn't like that but whatever it is you give the permission bail if it's not working you know you said it's not always sunshine and roses you know at night like sometimes the books don't work you have to to move on but but you know you just don't know and with Dracula you said Flora drank in every word and she would have listened for hours every night rather than just the one I could give her when I finished reading there was silence Flora looked shocked and regretful the story was over let's read it again you know how a two-year-old might be like you know let's read it again again yeah whatever that is that's a big that's a big clue that the whatever you want I did not read Dracula again so full disclosure I did not read Dracula and you try you really don't you know you try so that actually also um is a segue into the point of for if you're if you're kind of starting late later you know you're listening to this and like I don't have a three-year-old anymore maybe I don't even have an 11-year-old anymore you talked about in this book and this is common you hear this college professors so this is like post childhood who are saying things like I have students who have never they've never read one book from cover to cover never read a book all the way through so it's never too late anytime any place and so what this particular college professor talked about that you had interviewed she's like look I give him some juicy yeah the juiciest most accessible material she could find solicit I know salacious salacious thrillers with short chapters in lots of action the book is called sale by James Patterson you know I mean the kids listening so I'm like but it's a it's a book you know it's a woman yeah it's just got a lot of her and there's all this things going on and she said her students love it and this was one of my favorite lines I've ever read in any book so you know you know she starts this and here here's a kid never read a book cover to cover and says this I was up until four in the morning finishing this book where you left off and then said oh there's another book by the same author and it sounds interesting and that's from a child who that is the first book they ever read and so it just goes to show you it's never too late yeah no that's right and that's right and that's why I think you know it's also true that that if you know if teachers can I don't I mean I think it's just it's sort of it's just fading from the culture in a way but when teachers read aloud to their students okay that was the example you gave there was that she was a community college teacher and so yeah her students had had some of them had pretty rough lives some of them even came from prison to go to that class and they just had you you know and as we know there's a connection between literacy and kind of you know flourishing in conventional ways and non-flourishing in conventional ways um when a when a teacher reads to a class what's one of the I think one of the loveliest things because it really this is really for everybody and it's really for any like it's it's fine what you as you said read what you want you don't have to read what other people read like that's fine like choose your own stuff um and if people wouldn't get up and move around let them get them move around you just keep reading because you know what everyone needs to move sometimes but one of the beautiful things that happens when in a classroom and you can really imagine this being important in middle school um is when the teacher reads aloud everybody the able students who can read for themselves who've been read to at home the a plus kids the girl in the front row whatever they're getting the story at the same time and in the same way as the kid slumping in the back who's never read a book whose parents don't read aloud at home who you know and that kid gets it too so there's a kind of it's not it's not like an equalizing thing it's like an uplifting thing it's like like like and I do think reading aloud is one of those ways in which children who struggle can have the experience of kind of imaginative voyaging that children who don't struggle get all the time you know if you if you if you if you're if you struggle with reading you stress about it I mean I remember myself I was a pretty good reader but even in English class you know you you have let's say the teacher was going around the room and you were going to have to read a paragraph out loud so what are you doing you're not listening to the story you're panicking about the fact that you're going to make a mistake and someone's going to laugh so that's what you're focusing on and that's and that's true of kids who are really good at school but the kids who are not good at school for all kinds of reasons that's it's torture so when you read to them you free them from that there you create this like safe space where they can experience literature and I love that because I why I want this for everybody it's you know you don't have to be you know from any kind of family or any kind of background it's it's accessible to all and it's I mean really it is free reading aloud is free you just need to make the time for it you can read almost anything and and you just need to make the time so it's there's an opportunity cost of time that's it really yeah I love that you said that you know because nature is like we talked about earlier is the same you know nature will meet you at any point you know are you two months old are you 102 you know it doesn't matter it doesn't matter your background it's going to have something for you and you had talked about that I can't find it in my notes but you had talked about like you know maybe there's a kid who's in the eighth grade and they are a little bit behind on their reading and the parent could read it aloud to them instead of them struggling through and they're not going to understand it you know and so you talk a lot about audiobooks and how audiobooks are not cheating a superb a superb audio recording is a work of art a creation not so different in certain respects from a marble bust or a portrait in oils I mean what a book and you say you know 20% of american teenagers are leaving high school functionally illiterate they they can't read and write super well it's an it's kind of an awful way to start adult life but here's this college professor who's like find the juicy book you know from one to the next and it's going to make such a big difference in their lives and you even said this you said repressive governments limit people's access to books and information all right but at home you can read and discuss anything you want yeah yeah and just to know that like you know this is a this is a you know a tool of tyranny in the past is like you know is kind of tamping people I don't know that's right but like pushing people down to you know what they can do and what they're what they have access to and like if you don't read well even if the books available is 64% of us fourth graders didn't meet the standard for proficient reading in 2015 you know say this is grim stuff this is what you're writing about in your book it is just I mean a phenomenal book can you can you tell us because okay we talked at the beginning you go to this party then you have these two decades of you know reading with your kids but also this is really neat because I've never talked to anybody else who's um who really has even covered books in general but you worked for the wall street journal covering children's literature yeah oh I'm gonna just know a teeny bit about that like how does that job well you know I don't know the shoe fit I guess um uh yeah I mean I look I had been journalist for a long time and then this opportunity came up and I had all these little children at home I thought well sure well you know I mean you don't turn work down right so I took it and it started as a small thing in 2005 I they wanted me to contribute like I was really small it was like one column about one book every a couple of weeks or something and then it turned into it you know it turned into a weekly thing and it got bigger and bigger and bigger and yeah they've turned into Ginny it turned into 20 years of my life I was writing about children's books and my house was was you know fire hose is not the right metaphor but if you could imagine a fire hose that delivers books that's what happened in my house it was just like spraying all of her books absolutely everywhere um and uh yeah it's um and it was really it was really interesting I but you know I would say we we went through a lot of cultural changes in the last you know decade and um and unfortunately some of some of the more faddish stuff really made its way into children's books and I and I do think you know children are new in the world and they deserve the best of of everything that's been I my own feeling is that children deserve the best of everything that's been written or said they have a right to it it's the the things from the past that are the best things that have lasted because they're good um they belong to all children now you know they belong to all of us they're not again not just for the highly educated or the affluent or whatever but every kid so a story like okay this is if you let's talk about a really old story talk about the the odyssey or the iliad or the great the great myths and legends those those are the property of children right now your children their children and their children's children and we have a I think we have kind of a duty as as adults and parents as we're kind of custodians of our own culture and reading aloud is a way to kind of pass these things on or or reading making sure that children get exposed to them so how is this connected to writing about books for the journal I one of the things I tried to do in my when I was covering that exclusively was to identify books that might be lasting you know that were that had real lasting value and I think the truth is most books aren't going to last because they're just not good enough they just don't have a spark that they really need or the illustrations are just a little you know that's um that but I think that's always been the case you know ever since ever since people have had books that you know there are people who were terribly famous a hundred years ago who you've forgotten about now well that's because they didn't last so you know I I it was a great privilege to be able to make those judgments I will say that I think the best picture book and I think it should last of the last 20 years is um they all saw a cat by Brendan Wenzel did you ever see that book I've never seen it oh I to my mind it's just it's it just it I read it I thought this is this came straight out of somewhere else like this is it's just great it's it's just it's a simple rhyming story rhyming kind of picture book about about all the a cat is walking through the world and everyone's seeing the cat so a dog sees the cat but what does he see he sees he sees his idea of a cat so it's gives you an interesting idea of perspectives and it has a wonderful rhyming there's a kind of there's a little kind of almost kippling like rhythm to it yeah anyway so that's the kind of that was a little that was a real privilege and pleasure what a job one of my favorite kids books my I would say my favorite kid book that I was exposed to as an adult because I think it wasn't out when I was a kid is seven the seven silly eaters I mean this is by far I don't know if you read that one with your kids I don't know it oh I'm gonna show you it okay I have actually a copy right here because sometimes I give it away it's like my absolute fit I'm gonna send you a copy read your grandkids it is it is my favorite the seven silly eaters as soon as I'm done with Marla crazy I know she's a wonderful I'm sending this you're gonna love reading this with your grandkids I have an extra copy right here I'm gonna pop it in the mail what a book Megan this has been such a treat I want to read you say the emotional rewards of reading aloud are wildly out of proportion to the effort it takes we have everything to gain and no time to waste in the tech era we can all benefit from what reading aloud supplies but with children the need is urgent many young people are spending as many as nine hours a day on a screen they are surrounded by technology it informs their world it absorbs their attention it commandeers their hands and eyes and they need adults in their lives to read books to them not despite it but because of it reading aloud is a restorative that can replenish what technology leaches away before we wrap it up can you tell people about your memoir that's coming out oh you sweetie um yes I have a memoir coming out in the fall October 20th it's called free range girl and it is the account of a of a very unusual year in my life when I was I was 12 years 12 to 13 it's a big time in everyone's life for me that was in 1976 1977 so a lost world before the technology we have now I mean it was a completely different world we lived completely differently um and I was um I moved at that time to live with my dad my parents were divorced and I moved up to Maine to live with my dad in a homestead that he was building with his own hands he was part of something called the back to the land movement where people were trying to live in the country kind of like you know I mean there have been these waves in American history that people have done this and this was one of those times kind of idealistic dreamy historical romantic kind of approach to the world you know we didn't have indoor plumbing we didn't have um we had an outhouse um and I had books as my companions and um and I had a horse that I rode without a helmet because that's how we did it back then that's how we rolled and yeah and I had a bad accident and I spent a week in the hospital so it's all told in free range girl people can order it now already out for pre-order and hopefully we'll get to talk about it in the fall we always end our show with the same question what's the favorite memory from your childhood that was outside oh favorite memory from my childhood that was outside okay uh what I loved doing for years in the spring I think of this every spring is I would love I loved to crouch down in the roots of trees and make fairy houses so I would you know if you had let's say you had a bit of moss and a tree root and there was a little gap under the you could pretend that a fairy lived there and that was her forest you know and I would sometimes do little things like I would make little tiny cardboard doors and put them in the roots of trees so that I could imagine even more and that was my favorite thing to do I loved I loved making fairy houses in the roots of trees and yeah and climbing trees of course because you know that that's what we did oh I love it so much imagination Megan what a treat to talk with you about this phenomenally life-changing book that has been changed in almost every language you know all the way to Romania if you go on your website at Megan cockskirden.com you're like oh there's that language in that cover and it's just it's so needed so thank you thank you for writing the book thanks for taking the time to be with us today and I can't wait to read the memoir oh jenny thank you so much it's a joy to talk to you and I love how you yell it's so exciting