by Karen Boniface

April 3, 2020

Reading aloud should not end with childhood. It is not something to grow out of. It is something to keep growing into.

As teens come of age in a culture filled with chaos and confusion, books provide the perfect safe place to wrestle with questions about identity, purpose, relationships, and values. Stories draw us into the lives and worlds of characters we come to care about, sparking communication between parents and teens about important issues that concern them. Through sharing stories, parents can help guide teens to maturity, wisdom, and virtue.

Reading aloud, we learn to listen. To talk. To respect another’s thoughts and feelings.

In the movie I Remember Mama, a 1948 dramatization of Kathryn Forbes’s novel Mama’s Bank Account, an impoverished lodger—Jonathan Hyde—reads Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities aloud for Mama’s family. Hyde transports them to a world of sublime imagination. It’s one of my all-time favorite scenes.

Spoiler Alert! [Read more…]