Dad’s world with Jonathan deBurca Butler

IRELAND’S literary (or perhaps that should be literacy future) is safe. 

According to a survey that asked 331 parents about their children’s reading habits, our smallest citizens are doing fine when it comes to sitting down with a suitable book .

The findings noted that just over 85% of those surveyed introduce the bedtime story before their child’s first birthday and by the age of five the average child has read over 30 books.

Of course, we are not talking Ulysses or anything by Dostoyevsky here but those numbers represent an impressive range of different topics, interests and themes.

Fionn (three) and Luke (one) have very different attitudes to books. From the very beginning, Fionn has loved them. When he was about four-months-old, Ciara used books as a kind of marker for bedtime.

Now I say Ciara in this case because back then I was working evenings so it was she who was at home alone and putting Fionn down for the night.

It became part of his bedtime routine and it has always been something that he associates with hitting the hay. Latterly, and with the arrival of Luke, it’s something that Fionn associates with getting a bit of time on his own with his parents.

We have stacks of books in his room. There must be 100 children’s books hidden in every nook and cranny; beside the bed, under the chair, under the changing table and sometimes we even find them in the bed.

Subconsciously — and now that I visualise it — we have cultivated a reading culture in his room. We have a large wing back chair and beside it sits an old newspaper rack stuffed with books. It’s not something we did by design, but something that just happened.

Anyway, getting back to the bedtime routine, it has served him well. His vocabulary and sentence structure is astounding — excuse the pride but it really is.

The other morning when he was sitting on the couch in the sitting room he apparently hadn’t noticed that I was there beside him. He turned to me and said: “Daddy when did you sneak in here?”.

The child is three and is using ‘sneak’. Ciara later told me that he had also used the word ‘hopscotched’ as a verb.

Sometimes if we are reading and we make a mistake he corrects us. So even if we are not concentrating he is, at least he is most of the time.

Lately, I began to notice that he was getting a bit bored with some of the books. Room on the Broom was becoming repetitive and he began to get a little fidgety during Alfie Gives a Hand, so I decided I’d try to pull him back into the story by deliberately making mistakes which he is only too happy to correct.

“Alfie gave the present to Brendan,” I say, only to be interrupted by a “Nooooooooo Daddddy, it’s BERnard!” I apologise, Fionn giggles and we move on; until of course I do it again. It’s safe to say, he loves books.

Luke, on the other hand, is a little different. At 15 months he should be getting to the point where he can sit still for longer than a minute but in general he simply doesn’t want to and for now when you pop him on the knee and present him with a book he simply grabs it, eats it or tries to rip it apart.

He has shown some ‘independent’ interest however and on one or two occasions recently, he has taken to picking up a book and pretending to read to himself.

Indeed, I’m hoping that the image of him turning the pages of Mr Tickle while nodding and mumbling to himself with a little frown of concentration on his baldy brow will flash before my eyes just before I shuffle off the planet — a beautiful memory.

But for the moment we’ll leave it just a little longer before we bring storytelling into the routine.

At least until he lets us turn the pages and of course if he doesn’t learn to do it all by himself before then. You never know with Lukey.

We have stacks of books in his room. There must be 100 children’s books hidden in every nook and cranny; under the table and we even find them in the bed