The Loud Crash

3 Years: “Are you going to get me the children’s book about the Loud Crash?”

Questions about how we got here, and where we came from, dominate every childhood. Curiosity knows no limits of religion (or lack thereof) and doesn’t exclude itself to children whose families do, or don’t, believe in a literal and biblical account of creation. Children, no matter their background, all reach an age when they want to know how this massive, beautiful, seemingly impossible universe came into being.

I am a deeply spiritual person and I consider my beliefs to a core part of who I am as an individual. However, I don’t believe literally in an anthropomorphic creator-God who sculpted the cosmos with his hands or his words. I believe in science, I believe in skepticism, and I believe in giving kids real answers instead of pleasant or optimistic fables.

That’s why, even before my daughter was old enough to ask, I went to the effort of making sure we had books that reflected our family’s cultural, religious, and philosophical beliefs. Just as no creationist would dare have a home without a Bible, I wouldn’t dare have a home without plenty of reference material for when my daughter asked me those challenging questions.

I was looking through several books that explain a secular, or at least non-literal, account of the genesis of the universe. Among them was one book that later turned out to be my daughter’s favorite: “Born with a Bang,” in which the narrator, speaking from the perspective of the universe, explains how our world came to be. It gives a detailed but child-friendly explanation of the Big Bang in a way that makes sense to almost all kids over toddler-age, but can continue to capture the attention of much older children (or even adults, if they’re not afraid to admit to enjoying a picture book)!

Little did I know that, while I was on the phone with a friend talking about my mission to find a good children’s book about the Big Bang, my inquisitive three-year-old was listening closely. Not long later, she came to me and asked when this book about the “Loud Crash” would be arriving. I suppose that, no matter how deep or scientific I want to be about it, a three-year-old doesn’t know much difference between a big bang and a loud crash.

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.