The Book Diet

When Kiddo was an infant, I spent those first glorious months at home pouring over parenting books and consumer reports on everything from car seats to baby bottles, memorizing facts about height/weight restrictions for cribs and lurking in the horror-filled recall lists for manufacturers of baby products. 

One day when Kiddo was a toddler, just after polishing off the book How to Get your Kid to Eat: But Not Too Much by Ellen Sayter (written, by the way, for parents of much older children but hey – why not be proactive about these things?) I had a brilliant idea: why not put Kiddo on a book diet?

Whoa – wait, what's a book diet, you ask?  Well, if we consider the definition of diet to be “daily nourishment” rather than its more sinister definition “restricted intake”, a book diet makes perfect sense.  My plan was this: commit to a certain number of books per day that Kiddo would have read to her.

Once that decision had been made, I went to research what that magic number of books should be.  I found lots of studies that recommended reading 20 – 30 minutes per day to your child.  I did some mental calculations and determined that, on average, it took 8 minutes to read aloud a picture book, and only five minutes to read a board book.  Adjusting for my child’s taste in books, our lifestyle, wind speed, and the relative position of the stars, I came up with the perfect number for Kiddo’s book diet. 

My child’s daily recommended intake of books would be 10.  You heard me – TEN. 

What became immediately clear was that 20-30 minutes a day was just not going to cut it.  I would have to find more time in the day for books. 

In the beginning, trying to meet the daily required intake of ten books felt like a game.  It was something akin to wearing a pedometer and trying to get 10,000 steps per day; you park your car a little further from the grocery store, you take the stairs, you get up to change the channel on the tv.  Except in our case, it meant that we were reading books at the breakfast table and at snack times; during the bath and on the potty; first thing in the morning and right before bed. 

It also meant that we needed more people on our team to read to Kiddo.  Our Nanny was a natural ally in this endeavor.  Here is Kiddo, age three, and her beloved Nanny:

Sure enough, the book diet soon became a daily habit.  Reading books became just another part of the rhythm of our day, like eating or playing or brushing teeth.  The number 10 itself wasn’t important, but I needed that number in the beginning to be big enough that I would have to change our family’s habits to accommodate more time for reading.   At guess what?  It worked!