When you take a little one on your lap and crack open a beautiful, wholesome work of literature, you crack open the geodes of wisdom, grace and love as well, right along with its pages. If you put your heart into reading it to them, you will inevitably help God’s love reign in this sad world; you will bring life to the culture of death and light to the milieu of darkness in which we live.

“Story awakens us to the beauty and bedlam of the world around us,” Sarah Mackenzie writes in The Read Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections With Your Kids. “It arouses within us a desire for mercy and justice and truth. It makes us fall a little more in love with the world we live in and the people God made to live here with us.”

Most importantly, you invest in that little one as a child of God, weave a tapestry of friendship with them and love them where they are at. When you read the words on the page with love, you help them see that the God who created the lovely melody of poetry, the numinous essence of the Sacred Scriptures, the artistic mastermind of illustration, and the mystical wonder of the story is the same awesome God who loves them unconditionally. You give them a glimpse of just how valuable and special they really are.

“I read aloud to my kids because I know my years with them are short,” Mackenzie writes. “Because I long for a deep, soulful, real connection with each of them. When my head hits the pillow each night, I want to know that I have done the one most important thing: I have fostered warm, happy memories and created lifelong bonds with my kids — even when the rest of life feels hard. These are moments we will never regret. Even better, these are moments our kids will treasure for the rest of their lives.”

Meg Meeker — Catholic, pediatrician, mother, and one of the nation’s most respected authorities on parenting — says that clients often come to her distressed about the “self-esteem” of their children. They are deeply concerned about how low-self-esteem issues may harm their children, especially in their teenage years. They wonder if they should enroll them in art classes, sports, or other activities to “fix the problem,” but “Dr. Meeker doesn’t think this is the best way to boost a child’s self-esteem,” Mackenzie says.

“A child will likely have great self-esteem if she believes her parents like her and want to spend time with her. A better alternative, then, is to spend time enjoying our children and to communicate that enjoyment clearly, says Dr. Meeker.”

By sharing well-written stories, artistic masterpieces, heartening fables, poetry brimming with wonder, and spiritually uplifting materials with our children, we are uniting our hearts and souls to theirs in an extraordinary way — one that will impact their temporal and eternal destiny in marvelous ways.

“When we create a book club [reading] culture at home, we send a crucial message to our children,” Mackenzie writes. “We communicate that their reading life matters and that it ought to be a source of joy and delight to them. We allow them the freedom and ability to engage with ideas in the place we want them to love most of all: home. Perhaps most of all, we give them a fighting chance of falling madly in love with the reading life.”

As the primary educator of your children, you are their best literary matchmaker. “If you want to raise a reader, you should not rely much on your child’s school,” Dr. Daniel Willingham writes in Raising Kids Who Read. “It’s up to parents to create an atmosphere where a child’s reading life can flourish.”

Every great book that enters our domestic church may fortify, ennoble and enrich each member of our families, helping them become the person God created them to be. As Laura Berquist, founder of Mother of Divine Grace Home Study School, wrote in her article, “Reading is Fun”:

But it is also important to think about reading whole books, creating a reading culture in your home, and giving you something easy and common to talk about with your children. Good and varied literature is important for personal development. An understanding of justice and beauty, right and wrong, sacrifice and greed, is going to depend on what the student encounters in his environment. He needs to have experienced these things, in some way, to think about them. It is to this reality that Plato directs himself in the Republic, when he tells us that if the soul has in it good, true, beautiful, noble, and heroic images, it will become like those things.

By allowing our children to encounter Christian virtue “personified” we sow seeds of faith, hope and charity in their hearts. We help them see what virtue looks like in an authentic, living way. Our children are told to want to become saints, but how can they desire to do so without encountering friends along the journey who have made it happen? As Berquist explains:

This is one of the reasons why saint stories are so important; the children learn from the saints, who were real people, living in this same world we inhabit, what is possible for a man to do, what heroic choices he is capable of. They also learn what those heroic choices are, which is helpful when they face such choices themselves, even on a smaller scale. Fairy tales and just generally good and noble stories are also important for the same reason. They all provide the children with the right images to promote a true understanding of reality, with examples of the choices between good and evil men face daily.

Good reading will give our families a keen awareness of the goal of earthly life and the order of God’s creation. As Michael O’Brien eloquently states in A Landscape with Dragons, “The sun may be green and the fish may fly through the air, but however fantastical the imagined world, there is retained in it a faithfulness to the moral order of our own universe.”

By nurturing a reading culture in our homes, we can give our families a foundation built upon sturdy stones of the true, the good and the beautiful. This, in time, will help us choose the Creator of all that is true, good and beautiful, all throughout our lives.

Here are some recent releases that can help us achieve this end:

For younger children:

1. Christmas in Heaven by Anthony DeStefano (Sophia Institute Press)

2. Great Pictures and Their Stories (a beautiful art book series by St. Augustine Academy Press)

3. The First Christmas by Miss Rosa Mulholland (St. Augustine Academy Press)

4. Loving and Giving by Clare Dawson (St. Augustine Academy Press)

5. Our Friends in Heaven Trilogy by Pierre and Germaine Noury (St. Augustine Academy Press)

6. Sisters of the Last Straw (a humorous and lively book series about religious sisters by Karen Kelly Boyce; the ninth is currently being released through TAN Books)

7. The Too-Tall Swiss Guard by Michelle Widmer-Schultz and Andrea Pavlat (Our Sunday Visitor Press)

8. The Adventures of Loupio by Jean-Francois Kieffer (A delightful Catholic comic book series published by Ignatius Press; the seventh is currently being released)

For older children:

9. The Seven Deadly Dragons by Dr. John Woods (an edifying, thrilling new Catholic illustrated series about the seven cardinal sins published by Extraordinary Mission)

10. The Mystery of the Green Star by David Bentley Hart and Patrick Robert Hart (Angelico Press)

11. Pudge by Joann Luke (Angelico Press)

12. The Seven Champions of Christendom by F. J. Harvey Darton (Angelico Press)

13. Mysteries at Gloria Circus by Sophie de Mullenheim (Ignatius Press)

For adults:

14. Illustrated Liturgical Calendar Subscription (a gorgeous, intricately-illustrated quarterly calendar published by Sophia Press)

15. The Well-Ordered Family by Conor Gallagher (TAN Books)

16. Mother to Mother: Spiritual and Practical Wisdom from the Cloister to the Home by Mary Elizabeth Cuff (TAN Books)

17. Flee From Heresy: A Catholic Guide to Ancient and Modern Errors by Bishop Athanasius Schneider (Sophia Press)

18. The Agnus Dei Planner (A lovely, spiritually enriching, yet very practical new planner by TAN Books)