Why Reading Aloud with Your Kids Is Important

Have you ever gotten inside a story? I’m not talking about understanding it or critiquing it or comparing it to another one. I’m talking about indwelling—being so immersed in the tale that the bustling world around you seems to fade to a whisper and take a back seat to this aural experience, this symphony of sounds. The story becomes a home, a place you reside in. And you start to see things differently from that place, maybe even to see yourself differently.

I have memories of this from when my father’s calming voice read The Chronicles of Narnia  aloud to me and my brother. We rested our little bodies on the pine bunk bed frames as he sat at the foot of the bottom bunk—just a voice, the sound of fingers on paper, and three humans living in the story. The memory is precious to me, since my father died of cancer when I was a teenager. We don’t have his voice anymore, cutting a trail through the silence for us. But my voice has replaced his as I read to my kids.

This got me to thinking, “Why is reading aloud to kids so powerful? Why is it worth doing for as long as kids will listen?” The answer hovers around the values of communion, development, and joy.

Reading Aloud as Communion

I’ve heard that many parents stop reading to their kids by the age of eight.¹ We only have one child above that age, but I’m happy we’ve continued reading aloud to all of our kids. One of the reasons we do this is that time is our most precious resource—time with our kids, time in the same room, time when we’re jointly focused on the same thing. Reading aloud isn’t just an activity to help with literacy; it’s an act of communion, of people coming together to share in something. And it’s not going to happen forever. That’s what makes those memories of my father reading aloud so beautiful. As he read, the three of us were joined together in anticipation, in response, in discovery and imagination. I’m not sure I can say there were any other times at which we were so deeply connected.

Spoken words, in fact, have always done this for God’s people; uttered words have brought people together. Humanity spent much of its early history in what Walter Ong called the oral stage of literacy.² Stories were spoken and heard in community long before they were written and read in private. Think of passages in the Bible when the reading of the law of Moses was a communal event (Neh. 8:1–3). Words were uttered and heard in an open space, drawing many minds together. This is also behind the importance of hearing God’s word preached. What we hear in public draws us into a shared mental space.

Reading aloud fosters this closeness, a deep communion with our kids. And it’s unparalleled in our fast-paced, buzzing culture. It forces everyone to set aside their tasks, their phones, and their ambitions to simply listen. And in that listening, there is communion. I crave that communion with my kids, a deep interpersonal sharing in story. As long as they’ll let me, I’ll be reading aloud to them and thus drawing near to them.

Reading Aloud and Development

Reading aloud also plays several roles in helping our kids develop. Research has shown that children who are read to don’t just develop better reading skills; they also grow in other subject areas that might seem unrelated: math, science, and history. That shouldn’t be too shocking, since all the disciplines rely on language to communicate. The more language our kids can process with us, the better prepared they'll be to handle language in other contexts.

In addition to serving as an aid in other subject areas, having books read aloud to kids enables them to do a plethora of tasks all at the same time. Rebecca Bellingham, who speaks and writes widely on the importance of reading aloud to children, notes just how much is going on for kids when they’re hearing us read. As we read, kids are engaging their prior experience, deepening their interests, building guideposts for interpreting life, learning fluency (how language sounds), thinking on the spot, questioning character motives and actions, and practicing social interaction.³ That’s a lot! How are they able to do all that?

When we read books aloud, we do the linguistic decoding work for kids—processing syntax (the way words are put together in a sentence), pronunciation, intonation, vocabulary, and voice changing. These decoding and oral reading skills require a lot of brain power and attention, and kids are all over the map in their proficiency with these skills. When we take on that decoding work, it frees them up to do what I loved doing with my father: getting inside the story!

Lastly, reading aloud plays a larger role in our kids’ development as human beings. What is reading really about, after all? Bellingham remarks that the point of reading is “to deeply understand, to think, to learn and discuss big ideas about the world, about the lives of others, and about ourselves.”⁴ We draw kids into this personal development as we read to them, as we ask them questions, as we get them to reflect and make associations with life outside of the book. In other words, reading aloud fosters the grand movement of personal change, of introspection and sympathy, judgment and refined value. Reading aloud helps our kids develop more fully into responsible and responsive humans.

Reading Aloud for Joy

Beyond communion and development, reading aloud to our kids invites us to participate in something basic to all stages of human life: joy. The same feeling that pulls me back into the memories of reading with my dad leads me into reading with my children. It’s the joy of being enraptured by a story. Bellingham says, “Reading should be fun; reading should be joyful; reading should be a feeling of being swept away.” It should, as someone once put it, feel like being “inhaled by a book.”⁵ At the end of the day, we read to our children not simply because we have to or even because we should, but because we want to, and they want us to as well, provided that we’ve found the right story for them. That’s part of the challenge and joy as a parent, of course: studying your kids deeply enough that you can find a story and say, “Oh, they’d love this!” The love for a story, the joy of diving headlong into a tale that takes you into faraway places, diverse times, and quirky characters—that’s what drives us. It motivates us each day to find a spot on the couch, pull our kids next to us, and crack open the book to see what happens next. And motivation, especially stemming from joy, is a powerful thing.

We never know where a good book will take us. But making the effort to read books aloud to our kids “gives them a special kind of access to the transformative power of story.”⁶ And since we’re all transformed by the story of God, what better way to spend our time with our kids than to listen to words that take us places?