Fintan O’Toole: Don’t buy your children a digital device for Christmas. Read to them

During the summer my 20-month-old grandson was in quarantine with us. I was sitting on the sofa, reading on my laptop. He toddled over and, in an imperious gesture, closed the screen with one hand, while presenting me with a book to read to him with the other. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so delighted by one silent movement. I knew that boy was going to be just fine.

I’m also not sure I’ve ever felt more melancholic, while reading a report on a non-catastrophic subject, than I did last week, as I was going through the excellent Children’s School Lives Study.

The bit that broke my heart was this, referring to the kids who started second class in 2018: “66 per cent of children stated that their parent or another adult at home read books to them ‘never’ or ‘not much’; 21 per cent were read to at home ‘some days’ and 11.7 per cent were read to at home every day.”

The authors of the study quote one teacher as saying: "I think it's dying (going to bed with a story) … There's such a wealth of language and repetition of phrases – technology comes at a huge price, because if they don't have the words, feelings, everything is through the same prism." Another says: "They go from phones to tablets to iPads to computers … They are on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook … Our kids struggle to read and we see it in junior infants."

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When my boys were little, I worked as a theatre critic, so I was very often out at night. I nonetheless made it a rule to read them a bedtime story before I left. I did it for enough years to go from The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Hairy Maclary, from East of the Sun West of the Moon to The Church Mice, from Narnia to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, from Just William to Huckleberry Finn. After that they were on their own.

Intimate thing

It’s the most intimate thing you can do with a child. You huddle up and enter a new realm together. For 20 minutes or half an hour, the world is outside and you are inside a biodome of language that springs into life even as you walk through it.

For an adult, there’s nothing as peaceful as this. People spend a lot of money to learn about mindfulness. If you borrow a book from the library, it costs nothing and you get a double dose of mindfulness – two minds, yours and your child’s, coming into synch. As the reader, you get to conjure this universe, but you also get to inhabit it through the eyes of your child.

As a pleasure, it is both in the moment and cumulative. It is utterly here-and-now. And it is also a way to mark the years, the gradual expansion from simplicity to complexity, the emergence of the capacity to remember and repeat the patterns of sound, the evolution of the ability to get more subtle jokes, the shift from wanting to repeat the same story over and over to being hungry for suspense and mystery, the urge to know what happens next.

What happens next when you read to a child is that two kinds of love fuse naturally together: your love for them and their love for language and story. The security of the bond you create allows them to enter into the darkness of the unknown, not stressfully, but with the courage born of trust.

I can’t bear to think that we are just letting all of this die. Let’s not fool ourselves. This is not progress. It is colonisation, the annexation of a rich terrain by commercial technologies designed to be addictive.

Bedroom ban

Digital devices have their place, for kids as well as for adults. But a kid’s bedroom, emphatically, is not that place. Handing kids a wired-up screen to play with is just paving over a magical garden we are allowing, unthinkingly, to wither.

Reading to a child is intimate, bodily, deeply shared. At bedtime it is a soft landing, a safe passage from waking into sleeping, from day into night. Flicking through Instagram or watching a cartoon on a phone just isn’t any of these things. You can’t eat or sleep or dance virtually. Reading together, likewise, cannot be simulated.

This is a choice, not an inevitability. We can rage against the dying of this beautiful light. We can refuse to be colonised.

Parenting is bloody difficult. Time is short. So use the time, make it count. Make it precious. There is nothing in your life so important that you can’t find 15 minutes to read to your child. There is nothing that will make your own life better, calmer or, as the years go by, more memorable. There is nothing that will give you so many and such enduring rewards for doing something so easy.

Turn on to reading, tune in to your child, drop out of digital distraction. Don’t buy a child a device this Christmas. Buy or borrow some books. Give the gift of time. Cuddle up, snuggle down, open the cover and stroll, hand in hand, into imagination and absorption, into language and love.