They Are Easy to Read…to

We are a family of readers and that is something I absolutely love about our family. While my 16 year old often will suggest she is not as much of a book nerd as the rest of us, she actually is more so than she thinks. While her sister may have what likely equates to a small-town-sized library of mainly graphic novels, the 16 year old teenager has a decent collection of favorite novels she will read and reread as well as just about every book about dragons ever published (and it may well be every book at this point). But the thing I love even more than our individual love of books and reading, whatever that involves, is our collective love of reading.

Despite their ages, I am still a huge fan and proponent of read-alouds. In fact, we are also big fans of family read-alouds; one of our favorites having been the Harry Potter series in which, yes, I did voices and my best British accents. Because we homeschool, I consistently include at least one read-aloud in our daily school activities, but have been known to weave in several nonfiction picture books as time allows as well. But, even when my girls were still attending a local public charter school, we still made time in the evenings to gather together and read a good story.

As you may have noticed, I love to find unique ways to connect with my teenagers, whether through music, puzzles, driving to appointments, or just before bed. I try to find time each day to check in with my teenagers even if I am not actively asking them how they are or checking up on what they are up to. Enjoying a read-aloud is definitely one fantastic option for coming together and strengthening our relationship. How so? you may be wondering. Let me share just a couple of ways this activity creates connections for us.

The most obvious connection comes through the story itself because who doesn’t love a good story? At this point in our family, my girls and my husband recognize my wonderful knack for uncovering well-written, brilliantly narrated, and undeniably entertaining stories. Together we have met some amazing characters and experienced delight as well as poignant heartache through read-aloud stories, including A Rover’s Story, The Firefly Summer, The Puppets of Spelhorst, A Christmas Carol, and The Hotel Balzaar. One of the things we enjoy as we read through a book is discussing the characters and their behaviors and journeys. Sometimes we talk about whether we are in any way similar to or quite different from a character.

This can be where some renewed connections happen, but it’s also a fantastic opportunity to gain some insight into my girls’ lives—their thoughts, their fears, or their views of the world. While the story is clearly the main focus, I have learned that interruptions are equally important during our real-alouds. Sometimes a teenager will feel a need to talk over me with an observation, an opinion, or a question and this is a beautiful thing (this applies equally to when they were younger and we read books together, so, if your kids, elementary aged, tweens, or teens are jumping in while you’re reading, consider they’ve hit the pause button on a movie and have something they are eager to share). It is worth having to perhaps reread a sentence or a paragraph in order to provide space to hear what one of my girls has to say.

There is a mystical wonder stories provide as well as an invitation to journey and explore ideas and places and ways of looking at the world. All of this is fertile ground for growing our imaginations and making space for creativity. What a wonderful effect a published book can have on our desire to write or draw or otherwise bring forth beauty from the depths of our own lives. Reading together has encouraged my teenagers to see what’s possible, not merely for the characters in the story, but for them as well. Indeed, sometimes they are more intimidated than encouraged, and that insight tends to seep through as mentioned previously in the conversations a story can provoke. 

Whether it’s their fears, their eye rolls, their curiosity, or their creativity, read-alouds tend to spark something worthwhile in each of us. And they provide us an intimacy of shared, inside jokes and references, and a point of collective memory. We might be on a random drive when one girl may say, doesn’t this (whatever she’s seen or heard) remind you of Name of Story? Or they may recall a moment from the book and finally be ready to talk more about the character’s experience or their own. 
Parenting is about planting seeds in our kids (teens or otherwise) and then nurturing those seeds by giving them room to grow, whatever that might look like in our teens. Words, ideas, stories? They cultivate similar opportunities for growth in all of us. And what better way to encourage the growth we want to see in our teenagers than to invite them to see us growing through the stories we read together?