Some of the other parents were visibly distressed. Their kids couldn’t read yet, hadn’t really shown an interest. Should they be teaching their kids themselves? The teacher responded with a smile. “No,” she said, “your job is to make sure that dinner is on the table. My job is to teach them to read.”

I couldn’t help but get my back up. I knew what she was doing—trying to allay just one more fear in an era in which parents have become fearful over pretty much everything. Still, it rankled, though I also wanted to laugh. Fat chance, I thought. One, I don’t make dinner. Two, how do you think Jackie got to be such a good reader in the first place? Don’t expect me to stop now!

In truth, I love Jackie’s teacher. Now nearing the end of kindergarten, Jackie has long since outgrown the color-coded books for different reading levels in the classroom. She reads books on a second- and third-grade level, and so her teacher brings in more challenging books just for her. But how did this happen? How did my husband and I come to grow a child who can read far beyond her years?

When I discovered I was pregnant in the late spring of 1999, I made the mistake every first-time mother makes: I read all the pregnancy books I could lay my hands on. My hope? To find reassurance. What I found instead were sources for endless insecurities. But one of the things all the books agreed on was that in order to ensure early language acquisition, the mother should talk to the baby as much as possible, first in utero and then after the baby was born. This presented a huge problem. I’m not very good at small talk. I spend my days, alone, in front of a computer screen, writing. Was my child going to be a late talker because her mother couldn’t talk? Then I hit on a solution.

I started reading to Jackie while she was still inside me. But not children’s books. I read her whatever I happened to be reading at the time: A Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust; The History of God by Karen Armstrong (both for book-discussion groups). After she was born, during that first year of breastfeeding, I continued the practice. When she moved to the high chair, I read her the op-ed page and letters to the editor from the New York Times, varying the accents to match the region of the United States or the country of the world the writers came from. I learned, to both our pleasure, that I could even do a Swiss accent.

Babies, before they can roll over or crawl, like to lie on their backs, being entertained from above, which makes sense. After all, how fascinating could the carpet, so badly in need of vacuuming, be? So we formed a new habit in our household. One or both of us would lie on the floor next to Jackie, arms stretched straight to hold a picture book over us, so that that’s what she’d see. And Jackie loved looking at the pictures in those books, laughing at the pages even if she couldn’t yet understand most of the words we were reading to her. We did it with magazines too. One time, not long after she’d spoken her first words, we were flipping the pages of Time. When we came to a picture of Al Gore with his then-new beard, Jackie laughed and pointed. “Doggie!” she squealed. Just to be sure she knew what she was saying, we flipped through the other pages in the magazine, before coming back to Mr. Gore. Again, “Doggie!” (Note: Despite this, Jackie regularly votes Democratic.)

So what’s Jackie, age six, enjoy now? Among other things, The Magic Tree House series by Dana Pope Osborne. She fell in love with these books when her teacher brought one into school for her. They tell about a brother and sister named Jack and Annie who discover a magic tree house in their back yard. In the first several books, the characters time-travel to find clues to how the magic tree house came to be, and later seek to solve riddles so they can earn cards identifying them as Master Librarians. The last one we read was Tonight on the Titanic. The great things about these books are: 1) they put a premium on reading, since Jack and Annie always need to do research to solve whatever adventure they’re on; 2) they’re hugely educational; Jackie now knows about the destruction of Pompeii, that women were not allowed to write books in early China or participate in the Olympics in early Greece, that far too many real people died when the Titanic sank; 3) they’re fun.

Tonight on the Titanic is #17 in the series. A friend has given Jackie the books through #28. If my research is correct, the most recent title is #34, Season of the Sandstorms, which takes Jack and Annie to the Middle East. What do you think the odds are that she’ll get us to buy her the rest of the series when she knows we can easily say no to toys, but that our family motto is “You can never be spoiled with too many books”?


Lauren Baratz-Logsted lives in Connecticut with her husband Greg and their daughter Jackie. She is the author of The Thin Pink Line, Crossing the Line, A Little Change of Face, and the forthcoming How Nancy Drew Saved My Life, all dark comedies; the forthcoming Vertigo, a literary novel set in the Victorian era with erotic and suspense undertones; and the forthcoming young adult novel Angel’s Choice. Lauren also has an essay in BenBella’s Jane Austen theme anthology Flirting with Pride & Prejudice, and is the editor of and a contributor to BenBella's forthcoming anthology This Is Chick-Lit.