Recover Reading at Home
By Danny Flynn
In the mid 2000s I ran a summer internship course for high school students in Washington DC. Each week we had around 20 boys from around the country who would get the opportunity to meet with multiple heads of state, congressmen, senators, cabinet members and CEOs. It was a terrific opportunity for these young men to hear directly from influential leaders in our nation's capital.
I distinctly recall a meeting with Congressman, Mike Ferguson from New Jersey. One of the boys posed a question which went something like this, “what’s the most important thing that you do every day?” His response was heartfelt, simple, and immediate. He said prayer is first and foremost. The second most important thing he said is that he reads to his children every night. He went on to elaborate about the second point because the first one seemed obvious to everyone in the group. The second one was more of a surprise. He explained that the work that he did on Capitol Hill trying to persuade lawmakers to draft bills that affect thousands of Americans really paled in comparison to the value of a parent sitting down each night and reading meaningful literature to their own children. He talked about the impact of the story and the importance of parents willing to sit down and take the time to invest in feeding the child's imagination. I don’t know if these young men ever took these words to heart, but I certainly did.
A few years later, when my children were old enough to understand fairytales, short stories, and the basics of a plot, the reading in our house increased significantly. I will also note that this coincided with a close friend recommending to minimize screen time for our kids. This combination seemed to be the perfect recipe at the time. Very quickly, we began searching out various reading lists for families produced by local liberal arts schools and used a lot of our time to head to the library and check out the best options from those lists. We used many Saturdays to go to secondhand bookstores and scoop up anything we could find.
Winter time served as a healthy respite from the cold to take shelter indoors by the fire with a great book. We have read whole texts together as a family seated in the living room with great anticipation for the next book in a series or the next chapter to see what will happen next. Over time, this evening tradition moved to the family van as well. Since we live much further away from the schools our children attend, most days headed there and back included things like Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series or Lord of the Rings or Treasure Island. During lent, we would often listen to the gospel narratives. Later we found The Merry Beggars have produced some beautiful stories on the Lives of the Saints.
They read things like Redwall, Ranger’s Apprentice and the Hardy Boys. Over time older siblings handed down books to younger siblings with notes of encouragement, like ‘wait till you get to the fourth book, when it gets really good.’ We read from the Children's Books of Virtues and when the kids got older, we broke off by gender and I took the boys to read Little Britches, The Golden Book of Deeds while my wife read Secret Garden and Little Women to the girls. There were plenty of nights where the children were waking the parents up who dozed off in mid sentence, but this made those nights all the more worthwhile.
What happened over time is that my children developed a keen sense of listening by being exposed to great literature read aloud directly to them. Their imagination grew the more we read and they were properly drawn into a good story through descriptive writing and character development. They noticed more, slowed down and observed and made far more connections to things. They saw themselves in various characters and learned about other ways of thinking through characters they were not exposed to previously. They picked up natural virtues from these stories and were faced with second hand dilemmas to consider and weigh for themselves. And when they eventually mastered the art of reading on their own, they received a reading light to attach to their bunk bed to keep the tradition going on their own.
Like most children that work their way through adolescence, some of their desire for reading fades as friendships, social life and adventures take center stage. What remains is their memories of these long nights listening for what would happen next, hopeful that good will triumph over evil and the discernment necessary to choose wisely.
Danny Flynn is the Vice President of Diocesan and School Relations at the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education
Danny Flynn taught for six years at St. Jerome Academy after it became the first diocesan school in the country to adopt a classical liberal arts approach; he then stepped into the principal’s role in 2016. Under his leadership, the Pre-K through 8 school has continued to thrive and expand. Since 2021, Danny has led ICLE’s Aspiring School Leaders Program, a six-month online school leader training program. He joined the Institute full-time in summer 2024 and currently serves as the Vice President of Diocesan and School Relationships to share his expertise with dioceses and a growing number of Catholic liberal arts schools across the country. He holds a BA from Franciscan University and an MSE from Trinity University. He is happily married and the father of 15.
