Reading did this interesting thing where it put us almost on the same side of the fence because now we're reading and we're cheering and rooting for the same characters and we're holding our breath at the same moment or gasping. You know, it realigned us to remind us who we are. That's Sarah McKenzie and she joins us today on Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, sharing her passion for encouraging you as a mom and dad to read aloud to your kids.
I'm John Fuller. John, this is a great topic and I think people are going to see this and hear this as we unfold it. When you read with your children, the benefits, they are astounding.
Let me give you one stat. If you read an extra day with your child, you know, just that extra time during the week for kids ages 1 to 10, that increases their standardized test scores by 15 to 30 percent. Oh my goodness.
You start looking for a silver bullet. This is one of those things. Teaching your kids how to read and reading aloud with your children brings so much benefit. I mean, there's another crazy statistic that people that are in jail today were typically severely underperforming in their reading skills at grade level. They're well below grade level.
It just can set you up predictably for failure. For those that read at grade level or higher, it predictably suggests that they're going to be quite successful in school, in college, etc., professionally. So parents, don't take this subject lightly. Reading with your kids is really critical. And with that, we're going to talk to our guests today about the importance of doing it and how to do it.
Yeah. And Sarah McKenzie is a blogger, podcaster, and speaker. And she and her husband, Andrew, have six children. The book we're going to be talking about today, I think it belongs in every family's—what would the room be?
It's not a library anymore. It's the family room, the kitchen. This is a must-have book. It's called The Read Aloud Family, Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids. And we want to encourage you to get a copy of this from us here at the ministry. We've got details in the show notes. Sarah, welcome to Focus on the Family. Thank you so much.
It is a pleasure to be here. It was a pretty passionate open there for me because I've seen so much of the data, and this is critical. We have something called Highly Capable Kids, and it's a program that we take into public schools and some Christian schools. We just have that curriculum developed. But it has been super successful, and it's found its way into most of the kind of the poorer districts in the country, Title I schools where they serve hot lunch, et cetera. But it's helping parents to better understand the need to read with their kids, be with their kids, do academic things with their kids.
And guess what? Kids are doing great. It raises test scores.
That program has been shown to raise test scores by 27, 28 percent. So there is something here about being with your children, reading with your children. It sounds almost too simplistic.
But what have you seen about the benefits of reading with your kids? I actually think that's the catch right there. It does seem too simplistic. So we almost don't trust it. I don't know.
As a mother, I often think if something is enjoyable or kind of easy to do, then it's probably not as effective as the stuff that's really hard. You're suspicious. Can it only cost a dollar?
It should cost a hundred dollars. Exactly. Yes. And then I'll believe it. But it is true. And concentrating on some of these basics are the right thing to do. Well, in his book, The Read Aloud Handbook, Jim Trulese says that if we could package into a pill, for example, all the benefits that just reading aloud to our kids would give them, we would all pay exorbitant amounts of money and stand in long lines to get it. But because it's free and doesn't require anything more than really just grabbing a book from the shelf and sitting down and reading with your kids. Yeah.
And not even that much of it. Actually, that's one of the things that I think is curious that we tend to think we the things that are good for our kids, we need to do a lot of. But we can see profound impact on the kids, even if we're only reading 10 minutes every other day with that.
Yeah. Now, one of the things my boys and I, you know, I had the bedtime story that was my chore and it was a great chore. It was one I love to do. And we constantly read over and over Goodnight Moon to the point where I had to start making up new nouns for that book because, you know, the comb, the mush turned into oatmeal. And but the kids loved it. And they could recite that, I think, even today in their 20s, they could verbatim recite that. But it was it was fun.
It was fairly quick. And, you know, it just got to the point of them hearing me pronounce words. And I did some funny things just to keep it spicy. And it worked. But that's what we're kind of talking about.
Yeah. So one of the things that we don't realize is that language coming in through the ear has a pretty profound effect on kids, even differently than language they're reading with their eyes. I think most of us have a bias toward, you know, having our kids be able to read, which is, of course, an important skill. But what we know is that when kids are really good readers, the better they get at reading, the more they're skipping words, the faster they get at reading.
So those language patterns, those complete, sophisticated, grammatically correct language patterns aren't being stored in their brain the same way they are if you were being read to. Let me ask you, you have a story. This is funny from when your kids were younger about taking them to the zoo to see the walrus. What was the thrill of that? And then what did your daughter teach you?
Yes. So this is when my older kids who are now all young adults, but when they were younger, we would take this weekly excursion to the zoo and I would let them pick. We're homeschoolers. We could go in the middle of the day when no one else was there. That's a good plan.
Yeah, it's a great plan. And I would say each of you can pick one animal. That's what we're going to see, because if you've ever taken a bunch of young kids to the zoo, too, you're like trying to walk them around. Everyone's sweating and exhausted and you're like, we're at the zoo, have a good time. Right. So it's a zoo taking the kids to the zoo. Exactly.
That's true. So we go to the walrus and this particular enclosure, the walrus is mostly behind in this private space. And you just have to kind of wait till he or she, I can't remember, comes out by the glass. So we're sitting there waiting and I'm telling them this is going to be amazing. Oh, watch the water's rippling.
Here it comes. And Allison, who I think was about six or seven at the time, all of a sudden the walrus comes into view and I hear her say, oh, Mommy, look. And so I look over to see her face and she is on her hands and knees staring at an ant on the sidewalk that's carrying a piece of food larger than itself. And I remember thinking, like, walrus, ant. And I thought, wow, what a picture of how our kids can help us slow down and see the ordinary beauty in our lives. Here I am waiting for this big walrus moment, you know, and she's teaching me that the beauty and the connection that can happen in this tiny little ordinary moment. We can see ants any day of the week just going to my driveway.
There's plenty of them there. Right. But that's one of the things that I think reading aloud can do, actually. It feels too simple, too ordinary, too mundane that on a normal day we can just pick up a book and read on the couch for a few minutes. And it can make this huge difference. We think it takes big walrus sized solutions, tutors or private schools or lots of money and time invested.
And there are good things to all of those things as well. But reading aloud is this really simple, unassuming ant that can actually make it really big. That's so funny. The observation of a seven year old. Oh, that's a nice walrus.
Let's look at the ant. That's funny. The other side of this, you know, even talking about my boys and Goodnight Moon, obviously that grew into their later years with reading scripture together, reading out loud together, one chapter for them to read, a chapter for me to read, which was all we're still doing that. If you can believe it, I mean, Troy's 22 and we're going through different books of the Bible. And, you know, it is I was thinking the other night, you know, he breezed through scripture talking about Melchizedek. And he was pronouncing it accurately. You know, I know he's older now, but I was still I don't think I learned Melchizedek until I was in my 30s.
I wouldn't have said it out loud right now without checking with you first. You know, it's that it's it's kind of that good thing again. And this is something you could do for a long time. But how does reading connect families, not just the benefits of it, but connection? This is the part that I think really took me by surprise because I had read about how reading aloud improves academics.
And it helps. We know it also helps kids grow to be more empathetic, compassionate, kind, because of the the way that as they're reading, they're walking a mile in the shoes of somebody else. But then what really took me by surprise is how reading these books gave our family almost an inside language, inside jokes, kind of similar to what happens when you go watch a movie as a family and then somebody quotes the movie later and everybody laughs. But you're doing it with these books.
You have so many more connection points to pull from. The other piece that I noticed as my older kids were getting into their teen years is that as we were starting to butt heads with each other, which happened, you know, once or twice. Reading did this interesting thing where it put us almost on the same side of the fence because now we're reading and we're cheering and rooting for the same characters and we're holding our breath at the same moment or gasping. You know, it realigned us to remind us who we are. I like that. There was a moment and I don't remember if we ever read the Wingfeather books or not.
Maybe we did. And I've just forgotten. I mean, it has been a while since my kids were a read aloud kind of age. But there is a parenting moment for you that came out of this the series.
What was that about? So in this is a fabulous series by Andrew Peterson. And in the book, there is a grandpa pirate like character who attends this garden. And there are these creatures that come and mess up the garden all the time.
They're called Thwaps. It's a fantasy novel. And I remember at one point our oldest three are girl, girl, boy, and our son had been sneaking into the girl's bedroom again. And so we're hiding in the closet. I was hiding. He's probably something like hiding to surprise them. So one of the girls comes out and says, Mom, Drew is hiding in our bedroom again.
You've got to tell him to leave us alone, leave our stuff alone. And in that moment, I knew I could lecture again and tell Drew again all the things I'd said before. But I happened to spy on the counter the wing feather saga, which we had been reading. And it just hit me all of a sudden. And I said, Drew, don't be a Thwap. And they all burst out laughing because he knew what it meant. Yeah.
Don't go in places you don't belong, mess things up and just cause chaos. And so that was one of those joyful moments where I thought, look at that. That ended up being light and probably stuck better.
I'm sure he snuck into their room again after that. And what a good way to get the point across without, you know, without confrontation. It didn't have to be heavy handed. Exactly. You alluded to this in terms of empathy. But how does reading allow to our kids prepare them for the challenges that they'll face later in life? I mean, that sounds like a really good lesson.
Yeah. I mean, as a mother, I know the thing that worries me most is how do I know that I'm giving my kids everything they need? Which you can't. First of all, you also can't know what they need. You know, now my older kids are moving into young adulthood. I've got a missionary and an art student and an economist. They're all very different.
They all need very different things. So I would spend a lot of time and energy worrying about how to give them what they need. And what occurred to me at one point is that every time we read a book, we are walking in the shoes of someone else. And we're seeing the world from someone else's point of view and a world that might look similar to ours.
And a lot of times doesn't look similar to ours. And we're giving our kids the chance to watch heroes display tremendous virtue and fortitude and have to overcome. Almost every single story has a point around the 75 percent mark where it seems like all is lost. Hope is gone.
There's no way that this hero, this main character, is going to be able to succeed. And I think if we're just reading story after story after story, what we're giving our kids is the opportunity to bear witness to that kind of facing of obstacles and sticking through. And like the consequences of what happens when there are bad decisions and good decisions and fortitude. And they've now borne witness to this so many times that it won't take them off guard, hopefully. You know, as Christians, sometimes we shy away from that.
But the power of entertainment is it does have a rather formulaic approach of the villain, the hero, etc., which I think is kind of seen as Tolkien or C.S. Lewis would say. That's kind of right there in the scripture. Right.
This is coming from God. He's the ultimate storyteller. Speaking of stories, you had a story in the book about a friendship between a girl named Rebecca and a boy named Billy.
Tell us about that. So a woman named Tony told me this story and she said her daughter, Rebecca, went to VBS one year and would come home every day. She had met this new friend, Billy. And as she would talk about him, she would say what his favorite food was or the funny thing that had happened at VBS. And she just talked about how much she loved this new friend, Billy, every single day.
So the final day of VBS comes, Tony goes to that parents production show thing that they oftentimes do at the end of a VBS week. And her daughter, Rebecca, says, Mom, I want you to come meet my friend Billy. And Billy comes over and he's on a walker. He has cerebral palsy. And Tony thought, wow, Rebecca never mentioned that.
I know so many things about this kid. And she never once mentioned that he used a walker or had cerebral palsy. And she also noticed that most of the other kids were kind of shying away from him. So she asked her daughter on the way home, she said, I'm so glad you were Billy's friend.
It didn't seem like he had many other friends there. And she said, you know, Mom, it reminded me so much of when you read us Johnny Tremaine. Because in Johnny Tremaine, the main character is a silversmith, revolutionary America. Right at the beginning of the book, he is disabled in his hand.
He's scolded and he becomes a messenger, a horse riding messenger for the Sons of Liberty. But she, this child thought, wow, I know what it's like for a person to feel alone and have no friends, because that's exactly how Johnny felt in Johnny Tremaine. And then she saw it in her real life, did something about it. And this is why I think it's a lot of times we talk about fiction. We say something like we're escaping to fiction or kids are escaping from their lives. I just don't think that's true because we live in story, because God made us as a story. When we're able to read a story on the page, this is how it comes out in our actions with other people. I really think that reading fiction helps us love God and love each other better, because we're just being reminded so much of the story that we are a part of, the bigger story that we're a part of. And Sarah, I was really struck by something you wrote in the book about how bad it is, how unfortunate it is that oftentimes we stop reading at a certain age, but actually our kids are learning life lessons all through life past that, and we should keep persevering. So there's kind of a mind shift a lot of us need to make. It's not like 10 years old, I'm done reading to you, but 10 years old, I need to keep reading to you.
Yeah, there's two things that stand out to me about that. One is that about the time kids can read on their own, about 10 years old, when there is also the time that they start to break away from us a little bit, and we need the extra points of connection. We need more opportunities to connect with them. The other important piece here is that our kids can always, our listening comprehension, our reading comprehension through the ear is always higher than it is through our eyes. So this is true as well for young kids. A four-year-old can't read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, perhaps, but they can absolutely understand it when their mom or dad reads it to them, right, or they listen to the audiobook. Same thing is true with older kids. One of my favorite, most cherished memories as a mom with my older kids is when my now 19-year-old son was in high school, and we listened to the audiobook The Screwtape Letters by C.S.
Lewis, and it was so amazing. One thing I should point out here, too, is that if anyone who's watching or listening thinks, my kids will not sit still for a book, this child never has sat still for a minute in his life, still to this day, and when we would read aloud or when we listen to an audiobook, even in high school, he'd be doing push-ups, he'd be doing sit-ups. For when he was younger, he'd be jumping on the trampoline, and I would think there is no way this kid is listening, but he actually listens better when he moves his body. Even my girls will color or draw while they're listening and listen better that way. But we listened to C.S.
Lewis' The Screwtape Letters. We listened to it all the way through. I had read it before, but when we got to the end, I said, do you want to read it again?
He's like, yes. So we started it again, and we read a little bit every day, listened to a little bit every day, caught things we missed the first time. Now, this is a 16, 17-year-old kid. I can't remember quite how old he was when we did this. And still, 19 years old, I asked him not that long ago, what was one of your favorite books we read together when you were growing up?
First thing he said was The Screwtape Letters. Yeah, it just made that impact. I think it's one of the reasons Adventures in Odyssey has been so successful. I think that's true. It's always been that drama, audio drama. And people have loved it. We are going to bring it out in an animated form next year.
So we're excited about that. But still, radio theater, another thing that we did. Of course, we hired Andy Serkis as one of the voices.
Of course, he was Gollum in Lord of the Rings. But did a brilliant job in our version of the C.S. Lewis Screwtape Letters. That is the best audio version of The Screwtape Letters, hands down. It's right up there. BBC Voice Talent, we went all out on that one.
But it's been a terrific production. And people can still get access to that. Maybe, John, you can let them know how. I want to hit the myths that you speak about. And these are the myths why parents don't read aloud to their kids. Hit those if you could. Yeah, a couple of them that come to mind that I think are really common. One is that we all have way too much to do.
There's so much stuff. We're so busy as parents. Yeah, I got it. But we are.
For all the moms out there, you really are. But that's not a good enough excuse. Well, here's the deal. Dad step up. That's true.
Absolutely. Especially at the end of the day, there is no mother on the face of the planet who has the energy to read aloud to her children at bedtime. They're doing it because they are good mothers. But all the dads out there should definitely be reading at that time of day and giving mom a break. I will say I think that so often we think we have to wait till we have 30 minutes to read aloud. Or maybe you wait till all of your kids. And if you have older kids and younger kids, they're never all at home at the same time. Exactly.
It's tricky. So I would suggest just trying to find a 10 minute pocket, even if it's I read aloud to you while you eat breakfast or for 10 minutes after dinner. If you're doing a family dinner when we're done, we're all going to read for 10 minutes before you go off on your merry way.
Whatever you're doing. If you read aloud for 10 minutes every other day, you will read for 30 hours over the course of the year. And you could read speaking of C.S. Lewis, you could read the entire Chronicles of Narnia in a year doing it that way.
So it's not a huge commitment. Another myth, I think, is that this is especially true in the world of social media. We see these pictures of kids who are being read to and they just they're sitting all primly and obediently. Yes, and dresses. Yes, and the house is perfectly clean.
And it's not true. Kids oftentimes listen better when they're doing something with their hands. So I would have a bin in the closet that had like Play-Doh crayons, drawing paper, things like that that we could pull out. And the kids could I would say, guys, in five minutes, we're going to read aloud. And I would just pull that bin out and then they could all do something with their hands. Legos are great for this as well. Although this is my mom tip here. If you're going to do Legos during a read aloud, make your kids tip them out before you start, because if they dip their hand into those Lego bins and start rifling around, all of your nerve endings will explode on fire.
Don't let them leave it on the floor because then the other nerve endings will go. Exactly. I'm just going to say this was something I had to get over was I thought my children should listen to me attentively as I was going through a book. I mean, it just took a while. Well, when I had a group of kids, it was sort of like, please pay attention. And I realized, no, they should be doing something. I could see that. I mean, you're my point.
That firstborn thing. Yeah, let go. Hey, we want to party.
Let's all move and wiggle and let it happen. It's interesting because as a listener myself, when I'm listening to podcasts or audiobooks, I don't sit there and listen. I fold the laundry or take the kids on a walk or the dogs on a walk or I'm driving the car.
And if I was just sitting there, I think I would my brain would not be focusing on what I was listening to. You also talk about five keys of conversation in the book. The idea that, you know, I could see this, man, I could feel it because Jean and I, you know, we typically were kind of formulaic, you know, let's read. Now let's discuss the application that we might have. You know, we both went to college.
So that's the mode to get into. How did that book make you feel, Trent? You say that's not really the way to go. Well, if you were to finish a book that you really loved. OK, let's just imagine you and your wife are in bed, you're reading and you finish it and you put it down and you look at your wife and you're like, that was so good. And she says, OK, well, before we discuss it, I want to make sure that you really read it and understood it. So she opens it up and starts asking you, where did it take place? What time period was the test?
Yes. And what happens so often is we end up treating our kids like it's a quiz. And what they're then answering is what does my parent want me to say instead of, oh, my parents really interested in what that reading experience was like for me. So one of the ways around this is to not ask a question at all, but to use an open ended question, something like who was courageous in this story?
That's one of my favorites. Who was the most courageous in this story? And you could ask your child that and see what they say. But if they're in the habit of answering quiz like questions, it would be even better, I think, for the parent after reading aloud a book together to say, gosh, you know who was really surprisingly courageous in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Mr. Tumnus.
You know, when he did X, Y, Z, that was really who do you think might have been kind of courageous? And all of the sudden it changes from a quiz where they're worried about getting it right or wrong to my parent actually wants to talk to me. A discussion. Yes.
Which is cool. No, that's so good. I was thinking about that. Like even with movies, you should be doing that. Why did the bad guy, why did he do such a good job in playing that role? Yes. That's a great question. Just the way he snarled, the way he treated somebody. Right.
Yeah, that's a good way. A great question I think you can use for absolutely any book or movie or anything and it doesn't even take any brainpower is what is something you don't want to forget about that story? And that's something that if you were reading that book and you put it down and you told your wife that was so good, if she said, what's something you don't want to forget about it? It doesn't feel like an attack.
It doesn't feel like a quiz. And it kind of makes you go, hmm. And then you kind of have to think through all the parts of the book.
So there's all kinds of thinking that's happening, processing that's happening in a really beautiful connected way. One of those great books, and it is also a movie, Wizard of Oz. Yes. So you kind of suggested in the book some ways to talk to your child about something like the Wizard of Oz.
Yes. This book surprised me because the book I think is so much more delightful than the movie and it's not nearly as scary. And the Wicked Witch is very much a smaller part of the story than she is in the movie. Anyway, I had pretty sensitive kids at this age and thought this might be a little scary for them.
No, it wasn't too scary. But one of the surprising conversations that came up was when the question of would you rather have a brain or a heart came up, because we're talking about the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, and they're arguing over which one is more important. And I remember stopping and just saying, what do you think is more important, a brain or a heart? And of course, my oldest firstborn is like, a brain, obviously. And her little sister goes, but without a heart, how can you love?
How can you love God? And of course, my oldest was like, not to be outdone. So it came up with this great conversation that never, we never would have had that conversation with a nine and seven year old otherwise. Yeah, that's so cool. And that's a great place to end because in the end, I mean, we have the greatest book that's ever been written, right? So to parlay all of that back into helping your kids read scripture, understand scripture, and hopefully eventually live scripture as best as they can. That is the goal, right?
That's right. This has been so good. Thanks for being with us, Sarah. Thanks for your work in this wonderful book, The Read Aloud Family, making meaningful and lasting connections with your kids.
I think that's one of the great things all parents want to do. And you've done a beautiful job putting it here. Thank you. Thank you. Focus on the families doing such good work in the world.
It's an honor to be here. We're doing our best. But listen, if you can be a part of the ministry, why not support the ministry monthly or a one-time gift, $10. If you haven't given to the ministry, only about 1% of the listenership actually supports us. Let's make it 2%. That would be a great help to us to do more, to help more marriages stay together, to help parents do the best job they can do, to help save a baby's life from abortion, to help that mom do better, and that dad, and so much more. There's so many good things going on here.
Just do it. And in exchange, we will say thank you by sending you Sarah's book, The Read Aloud Family. And guaranteed, I'm going to say it, we're going to guarantee your child will do far better than if you don't read aloud. Get ahold of us today and donate as you can online. We've got the link in the show notes. Or give us a call, 800, the letter A and the word family. And by the way, when you're online, check out all the great resources we have for you as a family. We've got kids magazines, we've got radio theater. As Jim mentioned, there's so much here for you as a parent.
Just stop by today, and again, the link is in the show notes. And thanks for joining us today for Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller inviting you back as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. If the fights with your spouse have become unbearable, if you feel like you can't take it anymore, there's still hope. Hope restored marriage intensives have helped thousands of couples like yours. Our biblically based counseling will help you find the root of your problems and face them together. Call us at 1-866-875-2915. We'll talk with you, pray with you, and help you find out which program will work best. That's 1-866-875-2915.
