With a 12- and 4-year-old, life is busy for the Jamison family. Reading is part of their everyday life, but there’s no set routine.
“It looks different every day,” Taurus Jamison said. “It may be right after school, it may be at bedtime, it may be during bath time. For us, routine is just making sure that you’re getting some type of reading in every day.”
Between work, school, and extracurricular activities, the family’s calendar is full, but parents Rodney and Taurus look for windows of time to work in reading together.
“We’re always on a hustle-and-bustle schedule, especially with the kids in different age groups,” Taurus said. “But if we can just find five or 10 minutes to do something together, why not make it reading?”
The goal for their family is consistency, Rodney said, not perfection.
“We make room for flexibility,” he said. “Reading doesn’t always have to be at bedtime. Or if we miss one day, it’s OK. We can make it up the next day.”
They want their kids to find joy in books, and to have happy memories of time spent reading together. Ryan, 12, often reads to his little sister, Olivia, and that time is special for both of them.
“Even though there’s a seven-and-a-half-year age gap between the two of them, they are so close, and I think reading will make them even closer,” Taurus said. “That’s one thing that I hope continues between the two of them, and just learning from each other. And not just Olivia learning from Ryan, but Ryan also learning from Olivia.”
Helping each child develop reading skills at their own pace has been a learning experience for Rodney and Taurus as parents, they said. When Ryan was the age Olivia is now, he was already reading, while Olivia is still learning. She was born in 2020, in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and so her early years looked quite a bit different than Ryan’s did. He took weekly trips to the library, and had more exposure to the outside world.
Having that normalcy now for Olivia is a relief, Taurus said, and her reading skills are right on track. Equally important to them is her love of reading, which she developed at a young age and is going strong. She often grabs a book and makes up a story to tell her family, acting out each part.
“Olivia loves to come up with her own stories to read to the whole family,” Taurus said. “She does the voices, the characters, all of it.”
Seeing her kids’ different experiences with reading has been an important reminder that every child is unique, Taurus said. And reading together can provide opportunities to know each child individually, on a deeper level, Rodney said.
“Reading, for us, I feel shapes imagination for our kids and for our family and for our future,” he said. “And it gives you opportunities to get in your kid’s mind and see how they maneuver when it comes to reading. I think it’s really important.”
