Too Much Reading

25 months: “’I love you, Mama,’ said the little girl, so I’m sitting on your lap.”

Nothing infuriated me more than hearing this seemingly innocent sentence from friends and family: “You read to her too much.”

There are reasonable criticisms of parenting practices—“She watches too much TV,” or “She’s spoiled” being among them—but when I heard, “You read to her too much,” my first thought was that I was such a near-perfect mom that the people who wanted to criticize me would have to invent a problem. I didn’t let my daughter watch TV. I didn’t feed her junk food. I rarely, if ever, gave into tantrums. So, instead, those who were desperate to find something to criticize decided that I read to my daughter too much.

What jerks, right?

Well, now that I’ve had some time to grow up and figure out the ropes of motherhood, I can go ahead and admit this: maybe I did read to her too much. We read together for about five hours per day. I’ve always believed that children, especially toddlers, thrive on direct one-on-one interaction, and, before a kid is old enough to hold a meaningful conversation or participate in a game of Candy Land, it just made sense that we’d occupy all those long hours with One Fish, Two Fish and Henry and Mudge.

There was one problem that arose from this, though—depending on how you would define a problem, anyway. My copycat kiddo decided quickly that quotations and narration, including the divided quotation format commonly seen in literature, is just how conversation works. So, for the better part of a year and a half, she ended most of her statements with, “said the little girl,” or some variation thereof. She even got into the habit of narrating her current activities as if she were reading a past-tense memoir of toddlerhood.

So… maybe the ubiquitous “they” were right. Maybe it is possible to read to a child so much that it influences the way she views reality and leads her to misunderstand the way communication works. But, at the end of the day, I think that if I can look back and say, “My biggest mistake as a parent was reading to my child too much,” I’ve probably done a pretty good job. And if I haven’t, then the effect of hearing third-person narration from my toddler is a pretty small price to pay for my mistakes.