Trelease recommends starting the day a child is born and reading to them well into their teens. He suggests that the focus of reading aloud should not be to encourage the child to learn to read. Trelease points out that children's listening levels are higher than their reading levels.
The Effects of Television
Trelease presents research findings that show it's a bad idea to show TV to a child under three--each hour of daily TV viewed by the child before age three, the risk of ADHD by age seven increases by ten percent. For older children, general scores of learning decline when children watch more than ten hours of TV a week.
Trelease describes the opportunity cost of television:
...it's important to understand that the greatest academic damage done may not be the content of the shows viewed but by what is not being done during those twenty-eight hours a week sitting inertly in front of the TV: the games not played, the chores not done, the drawings not drawn, the hobbies not worked, the friends not made or played with, the homework not done, the bikes or skateboards not ridden, the balls not caught, the books not read, and the conversations not held. I hear parents call it "my babysitter"--but if there were a babysitter who did that much damage to your kid's mind, you'd be at the police station in a heartbeat.
Why is Reading Aloud Important?
Trelease makes clear the correlation between being read to and vocabulary and academic performance. I think he misses the most important reason why reading aloud to children is so important. Daniel Siegel in The Developing Mind explains how the most significant stimulus that children receive is the emotional interaction they have with adults. Siegel describes how the quality of this interaction shapes the structures in the brain, and frames how we interact with others as an adult.
A Friend's Story
I told my friend, Gerry Power, about The Read-Aloud Handbook. A couple days later, he sent me this e-mail:
Hey there ... just wanted to share this parental win: Eight years of reading every night, kindling for Shaun's reading flame, just payed off. Last year he received two Bone books, which he brushed off as having 'too many words', he picked up last week and just consumed them on his own. So, I ordered the complete series for him, a 1300 page tome, which came on Monday, and he is half-way through! He has been up the last two mornings at 6:30 to read before going to school, and has been reading after school and at night. This was pretty much the same pattern for Mel, just a little about a year earlier for her. Anyhow, thought I would share after our conversation on Monday night!