Senior Parenting Reading Expert: Auntie Choi
Do you have children who are clamoring for you to tell stories? And they want you to keep going! When you get home from work, they are holding a huge stack of books and won’t eat until you’ve finished telling the stories, or they want you to talk for two hours. This is a common issue that I often encounter in my talks. Parents, let’s reflect: when you engage in shared reading with your child, what is it that you hope for the most?
You likely hope to create a warm memory, where they are particularly well-behaved and feel safe while listening to your stories. However, if your child turns story time into a pressure for you, demanding numerous stories and refusing to listen to anyone else but you, claiming your personal time as theirs, then I think you need to consider how to resolve this issue for yourself.
I suggest that in your shared reading relationship, spend 15 to 20 minutes enjoying one story with your child; half an hour is also fine. But if you end up spending two hours every day telling an entire book and they still feel it’s not enough, insisting that you keep going as if they are controlling you, then this is no longer a shared reading relationship; it has become a teaching relationship. We need to set an example and let the child know, “I need to have a schedule. Story time today is 15 minutes. Mom will read you two books, and afterwards we can do other things or discuss what we just read while you play or eat.”
However, becoming a radio, constantly narrating stories like a recording device, is not what we want to achieve in shared reading. Therefore, parents should remember that when children want you to tell stories, it is a wonderful thing, and we should not be afraid to tell stories to them because of this. We should manage our time, aiming to finish a story comfortably within about half an hour, then have a meal or play together, and later discuss the story. I believe that in a quality shared reading relationship, children will come to love reading even more, finding that reading brings them a new realm of experience.