Doing it by the book

If you want to give your kids a good start in life, hide their tablets on a high shelf and hand them a book. Nothing charges up imaginations more.

The Hungry Caterpillar and The Gruffalo helped me bond with my kids. Watching their little faces light up as I read to them, lost in another world, was magic.

They’d hang on my every word, not the reaction I usually get. So I don’t understand parents who say they are too busy to read to their little ones. If you can look at your phone for an hour, you can sp a re 10 minutes to go swishy swashy on a bear hunt. The Literacy Trust charity has just revealed that books can help a child’s mental wellbeing, and that, unsurprisingly, kids with at least 60 books are five times more likely to excel at reading than those who have fewer than 10.

But what really broke my heart was the fact one in eight children from disadvantaged backgrounds don’t own a single book. Not one.

Every child should be able to get lost in a book. So the National Literacy Trust’s Christmas Stories campaign wants us to donate our old reads so it can give needy kids a book for Christmas. If you want to hand over any old Harry Potters, go to literacy trust. org. uk/ christmas

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