Ten Tiny Stories About Reading to Kids

+Why Jamie Lee Curtis writes picture books

“Reading books to kids is my favorite thing in the whole world,” I told a group of three-year-olds yesterday. New picture books = I get to hit the preschool tour circuit again. It’s the best.

I still read to my 10-year-old each night. Currently, we are making our way around the mythological world. This week, we are reading Celtic tales. Next up, Chinese folklore.

I could share the research about why reading to kids is important, but today I will offer you ten tiny stories.

Story 1

Last week I met a former student for lunch. She’s an adult now, and I hadn’t seen her since she was a fifth grader. A few years ago, she suffered a traumatic brain injury. As she was learning to read again, she went through her childhood favorites. “When I read Frindle, I heard your voice in my head reading it to me,” she said. “I could remember your laughter as you read it to our class.”

Story 2

Earlier this summer, we took our tweenage children abroad for the first time — to England. Each night of the trip, we read Danny Champion of the World by Roald Dahl aloud as a family. Once we finished, we traveled to Great Missenden, the setting of the novel, and went on a 4-mile country walk through the woodlands and fields, listening for pheasants and keeping our eyes out for foxes.

Story 3

When I visited my son’s second-grade classroom to read my book I Love You All The Time, he told me not to be upset if his friend, who is autistic, wasn’t excited to see me. “He doesn’t like it when the schedule changes.” His friend sat in the back next to his teacher. When the story ended, he whispered to her, “That book is like you. You love me all the time.”

Story 4

“Go pick your bedtime book, right now,” I told my four-year-old. Afternoon meltdowns had turned into bedtime battles, and I was so tired. He returned clutching the book Glad Monster, Sad Monster and curled up beside me. His body began to relax as we read. “Did you have big feelings today, like the monsters?” I asked. Big nod. “Do you need extra hugs tonight?” More nods. When he didn’t have the words, he found a book that did.

Story 5

One of my older siblings turned me into a reader by reading aloud the first few chapters of a dozen amazing books — and then stopping. “Guess you’ll have to finish them yourself if you wanna know what happens.”

Story 6

I reread the last chapter of Walk Two Moons during a lunch break so that I wouldn’t break down crying in front of my seventh-grade humanities class. Students came in and I still sobbed my way through the last chapter.

Story 7

My two-year-old tromped back and forth from the bookshelves to the couch, building a Pisa-like tower one book at a time. “Mommy read time! I pick out all the books! So many books! You are so excited to read to me!”

Story 8

My late father-in-law didn’t always know what to do with toddlers and preschoolers, but he did know how to read to them and they knew how to melt against him when he did.

Story 9

The first time I read B. J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures to my five-year-old, I laughed so hard I had to stop reading to catch my breath. We read it three times in a row. When her dad walked in, she said, “You just have to read this. It’s going to make you say ‘Boo-Boo Butt!'” A few days later when she was feeling a little cranky, she pulled that book off her shelf and said, “Let’s read this one again. It’ll make me feel better.”

Story 10

I had the chance to interview Jamie Lee Curtis about writing children’s books for Oprah Online a couple of years ago. We both cried while talking about the power of reading aloud to kids.

Deborah: I just released my first two picture books— I Love You All the Time and You Have Feelings All the Time. When I was writing them, I would imagine parents and grandparents snuggling with their kids at bedtime, reading together. Probably because read-aloud is my favorite part of parenting. Do you ever think about the grown-ups when you write your books?

Curtis: Years after I started writing books for children, I played the mother of a boy named Nicholas Green in the movie The Nicholas Effect [the true story of a boy who was killed while vacationing in Italy]. In this incredibly difficult moment in the hospital, his parents decide to donate his organs. And what the father says to his wife in that horrible waiting room is this: “The thing I'm going to miss most is the weight of him on my lap during story time.”

What I realized in that moment was the power of being an author. Yes, I’m an actress, and I’ve sold yogurt, and I’m silly and vulgar and all the crazy things that I am—but I write books.

And what that means to me is that I am a catalyst for that moment between an often exhausted parent and a child. Think of the triangle that is created when your arms are around a child and you’re holding a book. Books become treasured connection points. That is a privilege that I feel deeply. That is why I’m an author.

Cheers,

Deborah