Reading Aloud to Children

Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Hass (1995), wrote: “Reading aloud to children must be one of the richest of human transactions. The child is having that first experience of the sustained power of its own imagination that opens up whole worlds, inside and outside, and having in it the voice – its own and not its own, the parent’s and not the parent’s – from which it first learned the rhythm and inflection and play of human language. We all remember this: the experience is a huge thing, deeply intimate and wonderfully impersonal. For the parent reading to the child it is a chance to renew his or her own adult experience of poem and story and to be companion to the child’s experience, which seems so alert, even in sleepiness, so without walls, because, I guess, a child’s imagination dissolves them so freely. In this way, it contains one of the great powers of parenting; it’s like being alive twice.”