The Wholesome Mischief of Reading to Your Children

Monkey Wrench Resistance Against the Machine.

First, I would like to just say that reading to your children is, in and of itself, a thing both rewarding and to be cherished. It should be done regardless of what age or context we find ourselves in.

However, it does take on a rather important dimension in light of the onslaught of the Age of the Machine. In a small way, developing the habit of reading to your children is an act of defiance, dissent, and resistance to the Machine. And if you read to them good books, full of truth, goodness, and beauty, you’ll be equipping them with an arsenal of counter-spells against the Darkness. When they grow up and the world tells them that evil is good, they will not be confused. They will laugh. They will fight.

We are inundated with endless streaming and entertainment via Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and whatever other variations of text, video, and image based social media out there captivating our attention.

While I find nothing wrong with a bit of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, reading stories out loud to your children is more than nostalgia. It is human. Because telling stories is human. At root, all of the Eternal Attention Thieves mentioned above are essentially vehicles for storytelling. But they are in the same category as McDonald’s is when contrasted to a home cooked meal. Telling or reading stories out loud to others is no less nostalgic than eating dinner at home around the table. What would happen if all of our homemade meals were replaced by McDonald’s? What type of people are produced when all of our storytelling is outsourced to the Machine?

As far as a tactic goes for mounting a resistance to The Machine Age, reading to your children doesn’t seem all that grand. But that’s because we’ve failed to realize the spell the Machine Age casts upon us: taking simple things humans do and mechanizing them.

One of the magic words used to craft this spell is Convenience. “Convenience” is the cry of the Machine’s carnival barker. And it’s an easy sell because it’s true. It is extremely easy to let Hollywood or Twitter dominate our attention, to do our imagining for us. It’s easier to waste an evening doom scrolling than it is to open a book, much less open a book to read aloud to someone else.

Look, I’m an easy going fellow. I have nothing against convenience per se, but often times we have failed to fully understand what we are exchanging for a particular convenience. Sometimes, even without realizing it at first, we trade off primary elements and touchstones of humanity—like imagination, creativity, focus, concentration, thinking, speaking, various physical interactions—for ease and comfort provided to us by some form of technology, which might not quite cut us off from our humanity, but might certainly dampen and distance us from those primary elements and touchstones of humanity.

For instance, the creators of a YouTube show might be able to read your comments below the video and gage some form of reaction based on thumbs clicked up or down, but they’ll never see you smile or cry or laugh when watching it. There is a disconnect. It may be innocent of malice, but there is a disconnect nonetheless. Now to be fair, an author will likely never be able to connect in the same way either. But the storyteller can. Which means I can, and so can you, when you read a book or tell a tale to your child.

There is a type of magic that happens only when the screen is removed. There is a connection made between teller and hearer. Especially when that hearer is your child. All of those primary elements and touchstones of humanity are firing in a good tale told.

And so I implore you to develop the habit of reading to your children.

It really isn’t hard, but it is harder than pulling your phone from your pocket at the first moment of silence. It’s harder than telling your children to turn off the tablets or get off the computer. Which is to say that it’s harder compared to all of the conveniences of the Machine.

But it really is easy to do, and here are four easy steps and some advice to help develop the habit of reading to your children.

Step one. Choose a book. (See. Easy.)

Don’t worry too much about choosing the perfect book, how long should it be, or even if it is exactly age appropriate. Just read anything they find interesting. Let them pick, but don’t let them pick every book. You know better books than they do.

Once a pattern of reading is established you can apply more nuance to your book choices. And don’t be afraid to read a bit above a child’s level. If there’s something you come across, a word, a scene, that you find inappropriate for a certain age, just edit on the fly. If they get bored, start something else.

At some point though, be sure to read through “The Chronicles of Narnia” (and please begin with “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”).

Step two. Choose a repeatable time and place.

Repeatable is the key word here. Read in the same one or two places every night or every week. Something regular so that you can develop the habit.

Try to find a time to read a chapter in one setting. If you can go beyond that, great. Plus or minus thirty minutes seems to be a good estimate. If you’re bad at sticking to habits, start smaller and grow from there.

Places that tend to work well:
-Bedtime (Classic).
-Dinner (Turn your dining room into an Anglo-Saxon mead-hall with this one trick!).
-Living room (Fireplace preferable).
-In the car (Let the kids take a turn reading out loud. Don’t read and drive.)

Step three. Read the book.

This is actually the hardest part, isn’t it. There will be times when you don’t want to read. It is easier to do lots of things other than read. Turn off the screens. Put your phone in another room. But this is why we create a repeatable time and place in step two, in order to make this step easier.

You’re the storyteller now.

Read with a steady and clear pace, but slow it down when things get mysterious, or speed up when things get exciting. Get loud or whisper when necessary. Sometimes when a book tells you a character laughs, go ahead and laugh. It doesn’t need to be a radio play. The human imagination will fill in what’s lacking.

Just don’t read it like you would a lawnmower instruction manual.

If your children are like mine, there will be interruptions. Sometimes the interruptions will be frustrating. Try your best to keep things going. Sometimes it’s just a clarifying question. That’s great. Answer and move on. Sometimes your kid is just being a jerk. The best thing you can do is to not lose your cool. Don’t associate story time with “Dad yells at me” time. Once you’ve developed a habitual reading time, these interruptions will lessen. I promise.

Step Four. Optional. Ritualize it further.

You don’t have to do this, but it might be fun and will go a long way in establishing story time as something important. If you’re reading to your children habitually, you are already participating in a type of ritual, which means the ritual itself is communicating something. At the simplest level, it’s communicating that story time is important. If that’s the case, you might as well infuse your story time ritual with some accoutrements.

One way you can do this is by creating a type of “threshold” that indicates the beginning or ending of story time. It could be a specific saying or prayer. “Once upon a time” is a ritualistic beginning. Or perhaps something tangible like ringing a bell before you read or lighting a candle for the duration. Finding ways to infuse story time with things like this, marking it out as a special occasion, will strengthen the roots of the ritual.

There you have it. If you read all of the steps above with an eye towards whatever works best for you, you’ll be fine.

And while I’m thinking of it, you don’t have to just read to your small children. Read to your older children who can read on their own. Read to your teenagers. Read (if you can) to your adult children (bonus points if you can read to them and their kids). Read to your spouse. Read to your parents or grandparents. Read to your friends or neighbors. Volunteer to read at a nursing home, or at the local library.

Speaking of reading to kids at the library…

Unfortunately, we cannot ignore the 250lb man wearing a dress in the room.

Know this. The bad guys understand the power of reading to children. There is a reason Drag Queen Story Hour is a thing. Perverts want to pervert your child’s mind. Let it serve as a flamboyant reminder that there is a war for your child’s imagination. Whether it’s in a library or on Disney+ efforts are being made to faggify the minds of children and to inoculate them against what is true, good, and beautiful.

In light of that, the forming and fortification that happens when you take the time to read to your own children is a bit like throwing a monkey wrench into the Machine.

The best mischief—wholesome mischief, holy mischief—is when simply doing that which is true, honest, just, pure, lovely, and virtuous doubles as an act of first rate rebellion against your foe. There’s a hobbit-like quality about the simplicity of it all—being at war with the forces of evil by just reading to your kids.