Adding to my blogposts “Parenting: The Goal of Right Living” and “Parenting: Teaching Daily Habits & Rituals“, this post deals with parental reading. By reading to their children parents can, among other things, positively influence their moral, intellectual, volitional and linguistic development, as well as help bring happiness and treasured memories to the lives of their children.

Children can gain understanding of how they should act in certain situations through their parents’s reading about the actions of others (human or not, fictional or not) in similar situations. Moreover, children might come to see, through stories, what the consequences are or can be of certain courses of action. Furthermore, such reading can contribute to the development and strengthening of right desires and the doing of right actions (e.g. in imitation of people read about).

Further, parental reading can expose the children to new words, ideas and information, including words, ideas and information that the children have not and will not be exposed to at school or in the context of their own private reading, watching and listening. Although reading to one’s children is closely associated with reading to young children, parental reading need not cease when the children get into their teens, or for that matter, their twenties. As the children grow older, parents can start to read more difficult books, including great works of history, philosophy and literature and can invite their children to become co-readers and/or co-choosers of the books.

Of course, how reading to one’s children will influence them and whether or not it will be for them primarily associated with happiness and interest or with frustration and boredom depends in part on the age of the children and on the books read.