How to survive road trips and naps
Thirteen reasons why kids and audio books are a great idea
It’s road trip season, and at my house, road trips mean audio books. On our recent drive to Montana, we listened to The Wild Robot Escapes, Ramona the Pest, The Five Children and It, and part of a book that about time travel and animals where everyone was so mean and jockeying that I vetoed the rest. Eastern Washington sped by, which is really saying something on a nine-hour drive with a five-year-old.
So in the spirit of happy road trips and other happy things, here are thirteen reasons why I love audio books, both as enjoyment and from a literacy perspective, as well as for parental sanity.
1. More story-filled moments
There is only so many minutes a day I can read or tell stories, even with really persuasive begging. Audio books mean there are often hours every day when my child is absorbing stories. This seems about right for humans.
2. Screen free entertainment
Audio books provide many of the parental benefits of screens. They’re really entertaining and can create long blocks of uninterrupted time and down time. But they don’t have the brain-eating downsides of screen time. I use them when I have a zoom board meeting, and for nap time, and dinner party bedtimes when I want to stay in the garden after 7:00 talking about bike infrastructure and tax incentives and Costa Rica, as grown ups sometimes do.
3. Listening while doing
The other thing that is really wonderful about audio books vs. screen time, is that my daughter plays or does art while she listens. Sometimes she’ll just walk around with the speaker, doing her five year old things, like an 80’s teen with their boombox. She’s more active and more creative than when she’s watching a show, so the time feels really rich. Although I should probably say she has cut exponentially more scissor holes in clothes and sheets during audio books than during shows. Everything comes with a price.
4. Fuss free preschool quiet time
Pick an early chapter book that takes about an hour to listen to, set it up on a bluetooth speaker in the quiet time space, and nap is done when the story is done: clear cut and no negotiation necessary.
5. Access books that are truly interesting
While there are plenty of delightful early reader books these days, most kids are ready for bigger, more complex stories before they can read them themselves. This is one of many reasons why reading aloud to kids doesn’t need to stop when they learn to read. Audio books can fill this niche too.
6. Supportive of many kinds of brains and learning
Reading just isn’t easy or enjoyable to all people, but that has nothing to do with how deeply they think or how much they love a good story. Audio books provide a way to absorb literature and stories aurally, which is really intellectually engaging for so many of us, kids and adults alike. I believe that especially if kids struggle with reading, they should have lots of audio books in their lives, not as a replacement for learning to read, but as a way to enjoy the pleasure of stories alongside the hard work of decoding text.
7. Audio book readers with delicious accents
Yes please, fill the airwaves of my house, actor with the delightful British accent. That’s all I have to say.
8. Pre-readers can hear the stories they want, that you don’t want to read
Does your child want to hear all the Magic Treehouse books? Or hear a story that makes your brain blur, fifty thousand times? Audio books, man. That noxious, beloved story’s just a faint hum in the background while you think (gasp) your own thoughts.
9. They’re free and bountiful from the library
There are literally thousands of audio books you can stream free from the library. Added benefit: they disappear after three weeks, so you only have to listen to a favorite on repeat for so long.
10. They activate kids’ imaginations
Unlike a show, or even a book with pictures, audio books rely on kids’ imaginations to bring the stories to life in images. This is good for their brains, and also I think for their tender hearts. A kid’s imagined version of a graphic scene will be only as vivid as their brain makes it, unlike a video made by world-wise adults. This is why, while we’re a long way from watching the How to Train Your Dragon movie, the audio books have been long time staples around here. (See the delightful audio book reader accents.)
11. Dreamy sick days
When I was a kid, we had a wooden boxed set of a BBC production of The Hobbit, on tape cassette. There were different actors playing the different dwarves, haunting recorder music, hoof beat sound effects, and a really great hissy Golum voice. (I’m looking for this version of The Hobbit, but haven’t found it in a digital format yet.) The recording was six hours long, so I listened to it when I was sick in bed. So many fever dreams of Middle Earth, that recorder melody leading me away into the Misty Mountains.
12. Sometimes the reader turns out to be David Bowie
This is true. (Check out his narration of Peter and the Wolf.) All my childhood I thought that reader was just some nice British guy who liked classical music. Then I tracked the recording down for the youngest generation, and what do you know.
13. Better than 500 miles of “Are we there yet?”
Unless it’s that book about all the nasty, conniving animals.
We’re not there yet
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