Parenting My Way

My daughter's father comes from a family of teachers and I was always an active member at my local library. That being said we were heavily in agreement that we wanted our daughter to have books around from day one. I'm lucky enough to be part of a community that has access to 'Dolly Parton's Imagination Library.' Its a free service that provides a monthly book for kids zero to five years of age. I enrolled my daughter when she was less than 24 hours old. Recently it has become one of her favorite things to get a book in the mail at which point she sits and 'reads' it to anybody who will sit still long enough.

Originally we would rotate thought the books and read a few words at a time on each page before the gremlin would turn the page insisting we are done. On more than one occasion we wouldn't even read the books but would flip through the pages and talk about the pictures on the page. The books are my daughters to keep as long as she likes, but we have still taught her that books are to be respected. Besides learning to read, being exposed to books at a young age opens all kinds of doors for children.

One of the things I love about watching her with books is that its never the same experience twice. With her desire to read stories to the adults sometimes the story somewhat goes with the pictures and sometimes the story is completely off the wall. Books opened the door for her to start being a story teller and creating her own world. As a writer I love seeing my daughter imagining her own version of things. It is one of my personal pet peeves that we discourage creativity and imagination in children of any age. Having squished imagination is probably a large contributing factor to big name entertainment companies are just rewriting classic story lines.

The importance of reading at a young age is also encouraged by most public libraries. I have yet to find a public library that doesn't have various reading programs for different age groups of youth. There's one where I'm from that does small drawings for completing different reading challenges. For example the big one is 1,000 books before Kindergarten. My library has partnered with an online database that allows parents to enter which books they read and when. It does count if you read the same book multiple times, which is great because lets be honest a lot of kids have their favorites.

My child has her own tablet, and I'll write more about that later, that has some letter and reading games on it. One of my two-years-old's favorite games is a balloon popping game. It has several different options to play including normal that just says the colors of the balloons as she pops them. It also has options for numbers and letters that announces the figure that she clicks on to help her learn what they are called. Her tablet came with a couple pre-installed games that help with reading but we haven't gotten to the point that she relates to those games yet.

Encouraging reading is also a way to encourage creativity and story telling. As a writer I love when my daughter comes up with a new story to tell. Understandably there is a line when it comes to understanding reality versus fantasy but that doesn't mean that creativity should be discouraged. My daughter even loves 'reading' her books to her baby toys.