You Are Not Too Busy To Read To Your Kids

It’s time for a reality check.

An article this week from The Guardian begins by lamenting the difficulty parent’s face in making time to read to their kids.

“A survey by Settle Stories, an arts and heritage charity, of more than 2,000 parents with children aged four to 10 claimed that only 4% read a bedtime story to their child every night, with 69% saying they did not have the time. In February a study by TomTom of 1,000 parents of children aged one to 10 found that 34% never read a bedtime story to their children, with 29% blaming late working and 26% the daily commute.”

This is a big load of baloney.

Here’s another quote from the same article, which begins by presenting the totally unchallenged assumption that parents just don’t have the time:

“Parents lead very, very busy lives,” said Diana Gerald, chief executive of the Book Trust, which encourages children and families to enjoy books and develop their reading skills. “We live in a world where parents are juggling work and home life. Lots of parents are working shifts and there’s a lot of pressure on families. People are increasing their hours.”

This is a very, very big load of baloney.

We’re All Just So Very Busy, Right?

People complain that they are all just so very busy.

They complain about it on their twitter feed, they complain about it at the coffee shop, they complain, complain, and complain about it to anybody that will listen.

Too busy for something as demanding as spending 30 minutes reading to our kids once a day, an act which has been shown by hundreds of scientific publications to have life-long benefits for both children’s literacy and parent-child relationships.

The sad truth is that the generations of Americans who are living in this country today have more leisure time than any American generation in history.

Let that really sink in for a minute.

Your work colleagues, the busy housewives in your neighborhood, the people you socialize with: none of them are as “busy” as they claim to be. Not compared to the millions of parents who have come before us.

The avg work week 200 years ago ranged from 50-70 hrs per week of grinding physical labor. The average work week 100 years ago included “for at least six months of the year, an eight to ten-hour day of hard labor.”

And we’re the generations of Americans complaining about not having enough time or energy to read a book to our kids after work?

Of course, aside from the rationalizations,  what’s really going on here is that our culture has wholeheartedly embraced the idea of wasting away our abundant free time each day staring passively at screens.

Children’s author Michael Rosen believes the TV in the bedroom is the killer of bedtime stories.

“I sometimes ask audiences of children, ‘How many of you watch TV till you go to sleep?’ and it’s well over 50% in most cases.”

The BBC recently reported the latest findings on the amount of time kids are spending in front of screens:

“Children aged five to 16 spend an average of six and a half hours a day in front of a screen compared with around three hours in 1995, according to market research firm Childwise.”

The parents of our culture, of course, are enthusiastically leading by example:

“According to a new Nielsen report…the average American adult over the age of 18 spends more than 11 hours per day on electronic gadgets.”

What does all of that time spent in front of screen media add up to?

It adds up to thousands of hours a year for both parents and kids of free time.

But how are you choosing to spend that free time?

Alternatives Exist

If you aren’t reading to your kids each day, there are solutions to take the effort out of the activity.

Sparkle Stories offer a subscription to all orginial children’s audio stories, created by the company’s founders, David & Lisabeth Sewell-McCann.

Sparkle Stories are slow, gentle stories that teach kindness, respect and wonder.  We have our own subscription and love listening to the stories on roadtrips, before bedtime, or in place of a Saturday morning cartoon.

Another baby step you could take is to turn off the TV and put down the device one night per week, all night long.

If it is a difficult change, you are very likely facing a physical or emotional addiction to screen time. In that case, this article might be a good place for you to begin, with 5 ways to break yours and your kid’s screen addictions.

Don’t become discouraged if these difficulties are present in your life. Even small changes, when applied consistently over time, add up to big gains for you and your family.