Why We Read With Our Kids

I recently read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time as an adult. I read it for the first time in high school for English class, and I honestly came away from this reading a little frustrated by how we approached the story in high school. Now, I don’t remember everything about studying it together, but I do remember a long analysis of the various points-of-view in the story. But we didn’t talk about it with the goal of heart change; our teacher wasn’t seeking for us to overcome racism or class superiority, she literally just wanted us to see that a story can have more than one literary point-of-view and be able to recognize them.

I don’t want to judge that teacher; honestly, even as I’m writing this, I’m reflecting on the fact that I did something similar with my own children this morning during school. We read two picture books, one written from the point-of-view of children on the Mayflower, and one from the point of view of a Wampanoag boy. We discussed how the characters had different struggles they faced, but I didn’t take the time to connect how the way the characters might have viewed each other would have caused them to act or react a certain way. And truthfully, I’m not sure I would teach it differently if I could go back. My kids weren’t in the right frame of mind (one was teetering on the verge of a meltdown at this point, and the other is exhausted from a busy Sunday) to absorb this information right now, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned by now it’s that books themselves are much better teachers of these things than I could ever be. So instead I bide my time and trust that all the seeds we are planting over the years will help our children to grow up loving ALL people groups.

I digress, but my point with that story was really just to emphasize that this isn’t meant to be a critique of the way I was taught English in high school. I was just struck by this reading with the depth of To Kill a Mockingbird and was saddened that I hadn’t realized what deeply valuable lessons were in it when I read it for the first time. But then I began to see that perhaps I couldn’t have understood those lessons when I first read it anyway. I had been exposed to very little real racism at that point; almost any racist comments I had heard were secondhand. And I couldn’t read it with the perspective of a parent like I can today. There is so much rich truth in this story about how our children often see the world more clearly than we do; as Mr. Raymond tells Dill and Scout at the trial “‘Things haven’t caught up with that one’s instinct yet. Let him get a little older and he won’t get sick and cry. Maybe things’ll strike him as being– not quite right, say, but he won’t cry, not when he gets a few years on him.’”

So all this brings up the questions: do we read to teach literary elements? Or do we read to teach the truths that are foundational to us as human beings? There’s a time when I would have said the second only. But the more that I think about my own growth as a reader, the more I think it has to be both. Sometimes we teach the literary elements because our kids aren’t ready for the deeper stuff. And we trust that that first exposure to that particular piece of literature will bear fruit in our child’s life when the time is right. Like most things we do as mothers, we probably won’t see the results anytime soon; just like it takes years of planting the truth of God’s Word in our children’s hearts to bring the good fruit of salvation, just like it takes disciplining the toddler a million times to see real heart change, just like doing the hard work of dragging our kids to church each week until one day you wake up and realize they finally want to go on their own.

Mamas, your kids aren’t going to get these exposures to literature anywhere else. You can’t rely on the school or even the church to teach your children these things. It has to start with you. Ultimately, To Kill a Mockingbird could be summed up in this one line from Atticus Finch “‘If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’” And this applies to every single person in To Kill a Mockingbird, and to every single person in our lives, whether it’s the person who shocks you with what they believe or the person who grates on your nerves in your local church. We plant these seeds in our children, we model how to make them grow, and we trust that the end result will be God-followers who know how to “get in someone else’s skin and walk around.” After all, Christ Himself did this for us in the most literal way possible (John 1:14).

I’m so thankful for that high school English teacher who recognized that a classroom of twenty sixteen-year-olds who were as sheltered from the world as any kids their age could possibly be weren’t going to grasp the deep, deep ideas in To Kill a Mockingbird, yet she still made us read it anyway. She still talked about it with us even when it seemed like we didn’t care. She still planted seeds in us so that we could come back to this book later and finally get it. Keep planting, mama!