As a Christian mother, you embark on a critical journey—from the cradle to adolescence—to nurture not just readers, but thinkers and believers. It's a journey filled with both joy and responsibility as you introduce your children to literature that is good, beautiful, and true. It is not merely about teaching them to decode symbols on a page but guiding them to discover the vast realms of imagination, wisdom, and truth that literature holds.
A Legacy of Letters
The first memories of reading are filled with the soft glow of the nursery lamp and board books and the rhythmic cadence of stories being read aloud. It's in these serene moments that you lay the foundation not only for basic literacy but for a lifelong love of meaningful stories. We must move past considering board books as merely primer for phonics, and instead consider ourselves cultivating a hunger for stories in our children. In all that repetition, our children are beginning to understand rhythm and rhyme and prose.
Together in the Story
Reading with our children is an act of togetherness, a shared voyage into the heart of imagination. In these moments, you'll find laughter and common ground, experiencing the world anew through your child's eyes, shaping their tastes for what is genuinely enriching. The stories we choose to read aloud become the backdrop against which our children's tastes are formed—tastes for what is good, beautiful, and true. These are the moments when we, as parents, have the privilege to guide our children through the vast sea of literature, steering them towards those works that enlighten and enrich, while navigating away from the shoals of the trivial and the transient.
The Discerning Heart
As your children grow, your role evolves from narrator to advisor. You guide them towards autonomy in their literary choices, helping them cultivate a discerning heart that seeks virtue in what they read. It's here that we must tread lightly, encouraging exploration while providing the tools to discern not just quality, but virtue in what they read. Our goal is not to shelter but to prepare our children to engage with the world critically and thoughtfully, to recognize the reflection of God’s truth even in stories penned by human hands.
Beyond the Page
And yet, the act of reading is not an end in itself but a means to an end. It's a conduit for virtue, a practice ground for empathy, and a wellspring for wisdom. Our aspirations for our children as readers are bound up not in the act of reading but in the kind of people reading helps them become. We aim to raise children who are not just literate but literarily nourished, equipped with both the wisdom to discern and the courage to engage with the world around them.
The Final Chapter
In the end, perhaps our greatest hope is that our children find in reading a reflection of the grand narrative of redemption that underpins our faith. Just as every story holds the promise of a conclusion, so too does the Christian life point towards glory in consummation—the great and final turning of all things towards good. In teaching your children to love reading, you are teaching them to long for the resolution of all things, to anticipate the day when every tear will be wiped away, and every story will find its fulfillment in the eternal presence of the Author of Life.
In this journey of fostering readers, we do more than teach our children to read; we invite them into the ongoing story of God’s work in the world, encouraging them to take their place in that story, to read it, to love it, and ultimately, to live it.