Reading Rule No. 1: Turn Off the TV

Eleven years ago, Jim and Susan Trelease imposed a new household rule: no television for their son and daughter on school nights.

The result? “Trauma city,” Jim Trelease, author of “The Read-Aloud Handbook,” told an audience of about 250 people at Fullerton Public Library. Although Jamie, 6, took it in stride, fourth-grader Elizabeth “thought I was the biggest ogre in the world. She was telling me she was the only person in Springfield (Mass.) not allowed to watch TV on school nights,” he said.

Adult friends and neighbors implied that the television ban was a new form of child abuse, he said, while Elizabeth, who could no longer discuss episodes of favorite television shows with her peers, cried a lot. She even launched a letter-writing campaign to relatives, pleading with them to change her father’s mind. “She became a terrific letter writer, I’ll tell you,” Trelease added.

Yet despite the intense peer pressure--on the parents as well as the children--the television in the Trelease household mostly stayed off. The children could watch television in the afternoon after school, but their evening viewing was limited to two of three weekend nights.

After a year, this rule was modified to allow each child one evening hour of television between Monday and Thursday. “They became very discriminating” in choosing programs to watch, Trelease said. Sometimes they even forgot to exercise the one-hour privilege. Television had largely been replaced by homework, paper routes, hobbies, family games and listening to books their parents read aloud.

“I read aloud to my children initially for only one reason . . . I did it because my father read to me,” Trelease said during his talk last Thursday night. Reading aloud to children inspires them with a love for books, “a torch passed from one generation to another,” he said.

Books were not forced on his children, he added. They were made available and fun. “In too many homes and classrooms, we have forgotten to teach them (children) to want to read,” said Trelease, who still lives in Massachusetts but is giving talks around Southern California through Feb. 11. (For information, call the Fullerton Library Children’s Room, (714) 738-6339.)

In school, he said, “we spend the whole 12 years teaching them to work with books, as if having fun with books were something dirty.”

Under the Covers With a Workbook

Children, said Trelease, “do not fall in love with drill and skill, as important as those may be . . . (but) nobody can resist a good story. That’s why no parent has ever walked into a child’s room late at night and found the child under the covers with a flashlight and a workbook.”

The statement was greeted with appreciative laughter from the largely female audience of parents, teachers and college students. The group also responded warmly to Trelease’s animated readings from children’s books.

“I grew up as he (Trelease) grew up,” with parents who read aloud to her, said Brenda Dobell of Fullerton. A parent and college student, Dobell said she also reads to her two children, so reading Trelease’s book “was like having a pat on the back.”

“The Read-Aloud Handbook” originated as a 30-page, self-published pamphlet written in 1979. Later, Penguin Books commissioned Trelease, then a newspaper reporter and artist, to expand his ideas into a 222-page handbook, which was published in 1982 and became a best seller. The book was updated and reprinted last September.

The book was inspired by Trelease’s numerous visits to elementary, high school and college classrooms between 1966 and 1978. Invited to talk to students about his own career, he also chatted about books. Over the years, he had observed a dramatic decline in the amount of extracurricular reading done by students. Students who were still enthusiastic about books invariably had teachers who regularly read aloud to their classes, he said.

Education’s ‘Best-Kept’ Secret

Reading aloud to children is “one of the best-kept secrets in American education,” possibly because the activity is “so cheap and so simple,” he said. “All you need to do is know how to read and have some books . . . . If you want to build readers, read aloud to children early and often.”

Reading to children helps them do better in school, said Trelease. Statistical surveys have proven that the more television children watch, the lower their grades are. Yet a recent Nielsen study indicated that the average American household averages seven hours of television a day.

Three-year-olds are watching as much television as are 10-year-olds, and this can damage their intellectual development, said Trelease. “Between birth and 4 years of age, 50% of a child’s future IQ is established. I beg you, do something about it, take control of the TV sets in your homes before they take control of your children’s living and learning,” he said.

Despite the television restrictions he imposed on his own children, Trelease added, he does not think the world would be “better . . . if we’d thrown all the TV sets out 25 years ago.” Without television, he said, the Vietnam war and mid-1960s civil rights conflicts (such as the demonstrations in Selma, Ala.) would not have been brought into Americans’ living rooms.

Amount of Time a Source of Concern

But, “unfortunately, the Selmas and the Saigons are few and far between”; most television programming is entertainment, he said. However, it’s the amount of time children spend watching television more than the programs themselves that most concerns Trelease.

“There’s nothing wrong with entertainment,” he said. “It’s dessert. And I don’t know one healthy person who ever died from dessert--unless it was allowed to be the main course in their lives.”

Parents who don’t want to go “cold turkey” by eliminating television entirely on school nights might limit program watching to one hour a night, Trelease suggested in an interview after his talk. Parents with videocassette recorders also could let their offspring tape favorite shows and watch them on weekends. The trick, he said, is “learning to use the medium as opposed to letting the medium use us.”

“I know of parents who have given their children poker chips to purchase X number of hours of TV a week,” Trelease continued. The chips are paid into a piggy bank on top of the television set. The children can quickly use up all their program-watching time, or they can spread it out. “This does teach delayed gratification,” he added.

TV Stays On During Evening Meal

Before dinner, televisions should be turned off, said Trelease. “One-third of the American people watch TV during the meal. So much for family conversation . . . when are you going to ask the kids what went on at school?” he asked.

Trelease said in his own home, the almost-no-television “rule still stands today, as it did in kindergarten” for Jamie, now a 16-year-old high school junior. “James is going through his adolescence at the moment” and rebelling against many family ways--including the limited television rule, Trelease said. Some of the boy’s grades also have declined. “He was a dynamo (in school), and now I’m waiting for the fire to start” again, said Trelease.

Elizabeth, he added, went through a similar stage as a teen-ager, but now is a dedicated 20-year-old college English major. Not long ago she thanked Trelease for having set television-watching limits in her childhood, he said, for those limits had inspired her to have a paper route, to meet other people and to explore the world of books.

Children should be read to from birth, Trelease said, even though in their first months they don’t understand the words. “If the child’s old enough to talk to, (he or) she’s old enough to read to,” he said. “I hope this doesn’t sound too elitist, but I would suggest that you begin with poetry.” After all, he said, the child hears poetry while in the womb, through “the rhythmic beat, beat, beat of the mother’s heart.”

Books Belong in the Playpen, Crib

“Mother Goose” is good beginning read-aloud material, Trelease said. Later, home library books should be purchased, books that can be “chewed on, sat on and slept on. . . . Put ‘em in the playpen, put ‘em in the highchair, put ‘em in the crib,” he said, for children need to explore books by touch as well as sight.

Books should be read to children even after they enter school, said Trelease. “I want you to read stories to your children that are so funny that if they’re drinking chocolate milk, the chocolate milk dribbles out their noses,” he said.

Children should also be encouraged to read alone, Trelease said. “If there is not a bed lamp beside your child’s bed, first thing tomorrow, go to the mall and buy one,” he said. Children should be allowed to read as late as they like, and where they like, he added.

“Mothers, will you please stop taking the books and the magazines out of the bathroom? Do you know that there is more reading done in bathrooms than in all the classrooms and libraries in America? What we need are more bathrooms in our classrooms,” Trelease said jokingly.

Frequent trips to the library also are important for children, Trelease said. “Please come to the library . . . the library does not belong to the librarians; they do not want the library to belong to them. It’s yours, but it’s only yours if you use it,” he said. “I ask every parent to ask (himself or) herself this question: ‘Do I take my child 10 times more often to the mall than to the library, or a hundred times more often?’ ” he said.

Fathers Play Valuable Role

Of course, he added, those attending his Fullerton talk probably already believe in the value of books. “Well, here it is, another evening of ‘Jim Trelease out saving the saved,’ ” he said. “The people who most need to hear what I’m saying tonight are in the middle of ‘The Wheel of Fortune’ ” or out shopping.

However, he added, he was pleased to see a few men in the audience. “I must tell you how complimented I am that you are here,” Trelease told them, adding: “And I will assume that the other fathers are home reading to the kids.”

Many boys end up in children’s remedial reading classes not because they have “learning disabilities, but father disabilities,” Trelease said. Their fathers, he said, teach them that “the really important things in life are the things we throw and catch . . . you do not see me (the average father) get excited about ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ ” the E. B. White classic.

Through reading aloud to children, “more than building reading and listening skills, you are building emotional bridges,” Trelease said. “By the time your child reaches adolescence, you will need all the bridges you can get.”

The goal, he added, is “not to build bookworms, but to build complete human beings who are capable of thinking and imagining for themselves.”