Time to Read

It was revealed in a recent study that adults now spend more time glued to their laptops, phones and emails, than reading to their own children at bedtime.

Growing up, it was a much-anticipated night time routine that my mum would read me The Secret Seven while my brother would be lost in the adventures of Julian, Dick, George, Anne, and of course, Timmy the dog.

In the study conducted by BookTrust, it revealed that adults are engaging with their screens for up to 90 minutes, compared to the 25 minutes they spend reading to their children. But in a new positive campaign by the Trust, it hopes to encourage and inspire – both adults and children – to read more, and not just before bed.

I can’t help but notice now, when sitting in the doctors’ waiting room, standing in a queue, or waiting for a bus, that everyone is on their phones. So much so, that I make a point of not being on mine. It seems that today, with everything that our phones offer us, we are unable to put them down. A spare five minutes here or a 10 minute wait there, and we can’t resist having a quick scroll through, even when nothing new has transpired since we last looked at it. It’s an impulse, addiction, distraction and security blanket. We are almost afraid to be seen sitting alone without something in front of us.

The new campaign – Time to Read – aims to encourage us all to pull out a book rather than our phones or laptops. With such a recurring trend now developing that adults are glued to their phones, there is a worry that children will simply follow suit – something that we are already seeing with children as young as five able to work the latest iPhone better than their parents.

To discourage these bad habits, #TimeToRead wants to continue to help families in the UK find just 10 minutes every day to read with their children.

Reading not only provides a much welcomed distraction from current affairs and the black hole of social media, but it also helps to spark more creativity and imagination in children. Rather than computer games, it allows them to laugh out loud at Jeff  Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid or the latest tale by Jacqueline Wilson, or even to dabble and get lost in the wonderfully fictional worlds of Roald Dahl and J.K. Rowling.