Staying up too late is OK when it involves reading
When I was 10 years old, there were few things more thrilling to me than kneeling before the school library shelf filled with dozens of Nancy Drew books.
Nancy and her two best friends, Bess and George, were always chasing ghosts through clock towers, scheming to solve mysteries or unearthing clues in the dusty mansions of cantankerous widows.
I read every one of the 64 books in the series which spanned from 1930 to 1981.
To this day, those characters remain as real in my mind as any of my elementary school classmates, and I’m pretty certain that when I’m elderly, I will likely confuse reality from my childhood with a Nancy Drew plot line.
“Come grandchildren and gather around. I want to tell you about the time when my friend Emily Crandall lost her family’s heirloom jewels at the Lilac Inn. But never fear! George, Bess and I foiled that scheming maid behind it all!”
I loved to read then and I still do. I love fiction and non-fiction, the lighthearted and the heavyhitting. I love books that make me cry and books that make me do mental (and, in some cases, actual) fist pumps.
So, it has been vitally important for me as a parent to instil the same love of reading in my kids.
I just want to pass along a great little tip that I learned to help boost literacy in the home that works especially well in the summer.
Let your kids stay up too late and read in bed.
This sounds like a simple thing, but kids will do virtually anything to stay up later than they should.
Yes, there are Monday mornings in November when it takes no less than three attempts to arouse slumbering children and oust them from bed because they have stayed up too late to finish the last chapter.
And yes, I also know sleep is important.
But I also know that, during the day, there are often too many entertainment options competing for our kids’ attention, and reading often falls way off the radar.
But at night, when the house is quiet, and the bedside lamps click on, and the only option is to sleep or read, the kids will often hunker down with a paperback and have at it.
And not much makes me hap- pier than seeing a child lost in a book. I don’t even care if it’s a comic book.
So this summer, when there are no science tests the next day or alarm clocks set, might I suggest you take the kiddos down to the library, load up and let them stay up way too late?
As Nancy Drew said in The Secret of the Old Clock, “Read, read, read. That’s all I can say.”