Danny Beaver’s Secret
Yesterday I went to a type of baby shower I had never attended before. It was a “book shower”! My wife and I, now the parents of two teenaged boys, do not often attend baby showers anymore (compared to when our peers were having children). Leading up to the event, we were both genuinely excited about the prospect of celebrating with new parents and perhaps sharing a little practical advice. I think we both were particularly excited about the theme, as well. We probably overdid it a little.
I immediately thought of the best childhood book I could remember and set out to procure a copy. For me, that book was "Danny Beaver's Secret". It is a Little Golden Book first published in 1953 and illustrated by Richard Scarry and written by his wife Patsy. The copy that was read to my twin brother and me belonged to my father. I found a nice copy of the 60 plus year old book on eBay. It arrived the evening prior to the shower.
My wife took a slightly different approach than me. She un-boxed our boys' childhood books and went through them to find the best of the best. In the end, she narrowed the field to a few classics, including "Go Dog Go", "It's not Easy Being a Bunny", "Curious George", and "No More Monkeys Jumping on the Bed". She purchased copies of them all.
I believe that reading is such a bedrock activity of parenting that I wanted to write a Facebook post about it. Being schooled in modern medicine, my first impulse was to turn to a so called “evidence based” approach and find scientific papers, longitudinal studies, and, if possible, randomized double blinded controlled studies that demonstrated the merits of reading to children at a very young age. After an hour or so, I realized that those articles are out there, but their sterility left me cold, as is often the case when we try to quantify something of the human condition. There's no way scientific articles can capture what reading really means in our lives. I decided to not cite anything, but relate what I think amounts to my memories of what being read to and reading to my children has meant to me.
As a pediatrician, quite often I am asked questions about parenting. I know no magic tricks and I often suspect my answers are disappointing. My advice often boils down to “don't worry too much about that, it's just a temporary thing.” So I write now not as a pediatrician or some sort of “expert”, but as someone who has seen a little bit of the the arc of my own children's lives, and as someone who now has a little perspective from up above rather than from solely in the trenches. I think that my parenting technique has often been defined too much by worry and fretting over doing every thing just right at every phase of development (as I suspect has been the case with many of my peers). Fortunately, many of the things that I thought mattered most at the time – the inability of my 3 year old to distinguish between red and green, the complete lack of motivation of my 4 year old on the soccer field, and the lack of proper enunciation of the “r” sound by my 5 year old – have worked themselves out now. If your experience is like mine, your children will excel in areas that you never expected and take flight in directions you never pushed them. Yes, you will be proud of good report cards or when they work for something and achieve their goal. But emotions will overtake you and you will have to fight back tears of joy when when they show kindness to others, respect for their elders, or when they recognize someone in need and go out of their way to help them.
We can speculate about the synapses that are formed when we read to children or that we are paving their way for academic success. But I can say for certain that I have great memories of being read to as a child. I also have great memories of reading to my children. "Danny Beaver's Secret" was usually read to me and my brother by my grandmother – a gentle lady with a beautiful, proper, grammatically perfect west Alabama accent with a fragrance of a flowery perfume -- when we visited her home. I remember that the book resided in a closet in a back bedroom along with a few other classic books, including “Nurse Nancy”, a set of Lincoln Logs, a vibrating electronic football game from the 1950s (probably the worst toy every invented), and a few board games. Of course neither the ubiquitous 24 hour television shows directed at children nor “electronic devices” existed at the time. Our time spent reading was something carved out especially for us. We were building memories. We were also building a tradition that I passed on to my children. So I speak as a father and a burgeoning curmudgeon when I recommend that you turn off the television, hide the tablets and smart phones as far on the other side of the house as possible, and spend some time reading to your children.
The night before the shower, when the book arrived at the last moment, I introduced it to the family with fanfare. I insisted that we all sit down as a family, and I read the book to everyone. Appropriately, the boys made a little fun of the book, but I was not surprised that they still listened. It was a little corny to be sure, but it was also very familiar. I hope they will continue the tradition with their own favorite childhood books one day.
Originally posted: June 21, 2015
