Bedtime Stories

With the birth of his second child, Tim Johnson concurs with the quote that 'children are made readers on the laps of their parents' and find himself rather enjoying The Tiger Who Came to Tea.

It's more than a truism that children change your life; it's a cliché. One moment you are sailing along merrily, living a life that you have calibrated perfectly for your own convenience, spending your money on such essentials as skiing holidays and good claret and getting up at noon on Sundays. The next you are plunged into a frantic whirl of broken nights and dirty nappies, where the closest you get to a lie-in is a very occasional 8am start. Everyone tells you that your life is about to change. What no-one tells you is just what that means. As many an Attain reader knows, having a baby is quite simply the most momentous thing that can happen to you.

And then you have another (the clan Johnson now contains seven X chromosomes...) and you look back on those days when your first was a newborn with an air of bafflement. How on earth did we make it so hard looking after one of them? One's easy! Try getting the baby to go to sleep, maintaining the requisite seraphic aura of calm and security, while the sounds of gleeful destruction filter in from next door. That's parenting. On reflection this may have been a bad Lent to give up drinking.

Among the chaos, it is only human nature to seek a degree of order, even if only in the small things. Rituals and routines are as soothing for parents as they are for children, and it is in the bedtime ritual that I find my salvation. Central to it has always been the bedtime story, a little period of relative calm and quiet after the hurly-burly of bath-time when we can calm down, relax and get into the mood for sleep. My daughters quite like it too.

Books have always occupied a pretty central role in my life. On the basis that books are a Good Thing, I have generally allowed my book-buying impulse pretty much free rein. The inevitable result of that has been that they have spread remorselessly through our flat as though regarding bookshelves as a form of appeasement. On the basis that Prussia was an army with a country attached, our flat is currently a library with a couple of beds in it. Judah ibn-Tibbon exhorted us to 'make thy books thy companions. Let thy cases and shelves be thy pleasure grounds and gardens.' We've pretty much got that taped, though it's more a matter of making a virtue out of a necessity.

What's new is that where once I bought books on the death of money in Weimar Germany, now I buy books about travelling snails and great big grey-green humpback whales. It's hard to see this as anything other than an improvement. While modern literature varies from depressing high literary fiction (Room, The Road, anything by Margaret Atwood) to lazy supermarket-paperback writing (chick-lit, misery-lit, celeb-lit and so on ad nauseam) children's fiction benefits from fabulous new writing being added to a back catalogue that includes some of the best books ever written. You can range freely from beautifully illustrated books by Julia Donaldson or Quentin Blake, to truly great story-telling by Dahl, Blyton or Kipling. This is a treasure trove simply waiting to be discovered (or re-discovered).

So we read The Gruffalo and The Tiger Who Came to Tea together during the day, and then when bedtime comes around I reach for more old-fashioned stories. When my elder daughter was just a bump, I used to read the Just So Stories to her - her very first smile came while I was telling her just how it was that the Rhinoceros got his skin - and there's something about the rhythm and tempo of Kipling that makes him almost irresistible as a children's author: I defy anyone to read the Sing-song of Old Man Kangaroo without being drawn into its cadences.

If it isn't Kipling, it's Winnie the Pooh, complete, of course, with a range of voices culled from early memories of my own father reading to me, voices being of course central to bedtime stories. If you're not making them giggle, then you're simply not trying hard enough. What's essential for the bedtime story though, is the creation of a whole other world to explore together, ideally one that finishes each night with sleepy requests for just one more chapter.

The world of books can be a magic one, and the ability to unlock it is perhaps the most precious gift any parent can give their children. But it's not only about pleasure. Books are also the best possible investment for your children's future. A sociological study (conducted in 2005 for the journal Research in Social Stratification and Mobility) found that the mere presence of books in the family house is strongly correlated with educational achievement. Growing up in a house with 500 books in it affords 'as great an advantage as having university-educated rather than unschooled parents, and twice the advantage of having a professional rather than an unskilled father.' Even children with as few as 25 books in the family household completed on average two more years of schooling than children raised in homes without any books. That's not just Jennings goes to School on the bookshelf, that's the key to the bright sunlit uplands of educational accomplishment.

All right, at the moment with two girls under two, books are as much something to chew at, or at best scribble on. But the great thing about having a flat full of books is that my girls will grow up thinking of them as an integral part of life. It is, of course, a great deal easier to advocate lots of reading to your children than it is always to achieve it. We all work, seemingly, harder and harder. There are times when the last thing you feel like as you stagger in the door just in time for bedtime is to plough through an entire chapter of Mallory Towers complete with dynamic voice acting. Can we skip the voices tonight? (No, Daddy. No we can't. More book.) At the weekends, the temptation to give in to the wiles of the electronic babysitter in the corner can also be very strong too (especially given how good children's television can be. If you haven't seen Rastamouse yet, then I suggest you tune in. It's like The Wire for the sleep deprived).

But resist, if you can, the twin impulses of tiredness and self-consciousness (it's not something I've ever felt to be honest, but a surprising number of people feel embarrassed at reading to their children, especially if voices are required). Reading to your children is about the most rewarding part of parenting - certainly better than trying to instil table manners, or introducing them to the joys of sharing. From the very first story you read to them, to the first time that they get involved in the tale, bedtime stories are a little oasis of undiluted pleasure in the chaotic scramble that is parenthood.

Ultimately, of course, the goal must be to show your children the pleasure that can be had between the covers of a good book, so that they can forge their own path through literature. Parenting is, after all, the art of teaching your children not to need you any more. The time will come, far too soon, when bedtime stories are no longer required, because my girls will want to do the reading themselves (or will be reading something like the Twilight series, that I won't be allowed to read to them). Bedtime stories are the way to hold their hands and guide them towards the joy of reading. I'm just going to make the most of it while I still can.

Tim Johnson has been busy practising his Piglet voice for Sophie (2) and Millie (6 weeks).

This article first appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of Attain.