We hear all the time about the benefits of reading to your children. The book-loving, library-using establishment wants you to think it's all fun and games. It's NOT. I know from ACTUAL EXPERIENCE. Here are just a few of the possible, disastrous consequences reading to your children, or, indeed, letting them read to themselves, can have on your health and the health of your children.
1. Children may decide it is hilarious, every time they hear the sound of fingers snapping, to strip down to their underwear, don their shirts as capes, and run around wherever you are screaming, "Tra la la!"
2. Children may ponder ingesting worms, fried or otherwise.
3. Head wounds may result from repeatedly opening the doors to and trying to fit inside of a cabinet that resembles a wardrobe.
4. You will be spied upon. And your actions will be recorded in a notebook. Depending on whether the perpetrator is Harriet or Nancy, such records may contain an overabundance of exclamation points.
5. Sever brain atrophy is a definite possibility.
6. Certain books may carry multiple deleterious consequences.
7. Your child may demand, in public, that you outline the geneology of the line of gods and half-gods descended from Cronos. Without Wikipedia.
8. Your child may threaten to punch you in the head.*
9. Child may demand a pet prairie dog.
10. Your child may learn that there are people who are different from her, that sometimes women fall in love with other women, and that the world is not the black and white moral checkerboard she has been led to believe. Also, what a scrotum is.
There is only one solution: ban them all. Ban them all, I say, and let kids engage in safe things like skateboarding and their 1,680 minutes (average) TV watching a week.
Bonus points if you know what books caused all of the above in my children...
* Sorry. So very, very sorry.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
Why You Should Not Read To Your Children
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7 comments:
I've read #1-4 and #7 ... does that count?
Other hazard of turning your kids into readers: they become immobile teenagers who you can't budge from the sofa to do their chores until they finish the next chapter.
LOL--sad but true! They'll also insist that you act out their favorite stories with them, and they will be merciless casting directors--you will have NO choice as to which character role you are assigned. This will occur not just at home, but in public places such as restaurants.
Oh, Ruth, I have been there. I am always the non-magical creature and am forever in trouble for failure to behave.
Diane, you have read #8 too. And I already can't budge Tink! I can't imagine when she's Son's age.
Awesome post! He he he. I better stop reading to my kids!
13. Your children will still, even at the ages of 17 and 21, want to take a walk in the woods so that the whole family can play Pooh Sticks.
Thanks, Lisa!
Debbie, I'm secretly so glad to hear that.
currently in my home, there is a proliforation of espionage behavior by my child who is reading 'NERDS" for the 10+ time in a row; a heck of a lot engagement with caterpillars and what they turn into at the end of a week of binge eating; and discussions of motorcycle riding horsemen of the apocalypse. (see the end of diane t's comment as example for that last one)
there are also, funny things here there and everywhere.
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