By the time my daughter was six, she was already a voracious reader.

Books littered the floor of her small bedroom like leaves on a forest floor. They were wedged into the space between the wall and her bed. They appeared under couch cushions, in the bathroom, and on top of the piano.

Any volume on any subject was fair game for her, but as she moved deeper into chapter-book land, one issue began to absorb her.

As she evaluated a book, studied its cover and read its flyleaf, a moment would come when she would hold the book up for my inspection and ask,

“Is this a true story?”

And at this point, the answer was always no. Although she enjoyed whatever story she was reading nonetheless, the negative answer never failed to disappoint her.

She asked the question mid-way through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl, and responded to my inevitable answer with a wise nod.

“I thought so, because the factory’s made of chocolate and that wouldn’t work because the chocolate would melt.”

One summer evening, I was sitting on the porch swing, reading my own not-a-true-story, when I heard my daughter’s footsteps approach over the hardwood floor inside. She pushed open the screen door, held up a book, and asked.

“Is this a true story?”

Without even looking, I was about to offer my usual answer, but then I spied the cover. On it was drawn a little girl with brown hair, holding a doll. She was standing inside a log house, looking out at the reader with a slight smile. I caught myself, and changed course.

“Yes,” I said. “This is a true story.”

It was, of course, Little House in the Big Woods.

My daughter’s face broke out in a huge grin, and she gave me that wise nod, once again.

“I thought so. Because the little girl’s name in the book is Laura, and so is the writer’s.”

What was at work in my daughter’s curious mind was, in the end, the nagging suspicion that there was something important about “truth.” Her persistent question pointed to her intuition that if a story wasn’t true, it wasn’t worth telling. Why bother, after all, to take the trouble to write a tale if it wasn’t true? What would be the point of that?

And of course, she was right. But they do. In fact, aside from the technical skill of a writer, that is one of the most important elements that draws us to a particular story and renders it memorable: the truth it expresses. This aspect of story is important, not only for adult readers, but for children as well.

That truth may be emotional – in Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny, a mother rabbit responds to every challenge her little bunny poses about the places he might go and what else he might become with promise of her own presence. The story sticks with us because it’s true: that’s what mothers do.

Or the truth might be psychological. Take another bunny – Peter Rabbit, to be precise. Children adore Peter because he is so true to their own psyches: he’s drawn to the forbidden and finds himself tangled in regret and yearnings for home when the whole mess collapses around him and Mr. McGregor is hot on his tail.

Whatever the case, as writers as diverse as psychologist Bruno Bettleheim, J.R.R. Tolkein (in an essay “On Fairy Stories”) and G.K. Chesterton (in his book Orthodoxy) have pointed out, children learn about the world through the stories they hear. That’s the power of story, and that’s why the act of reading to a child is so important.

Certainly, there are undisputed developmental benefits related to shared reading between adults and children.

Jim Trelease is the most well-known proponent of reading aloud. His book, The Read-Aloud Handbook, has sold over a million copies and is a valuable support to parents looking for help in both how and what to read.

In his book, Trelease sites a 1985 study by a nationwide Commission or Reading that evaluated thousands of studies on children’s reading success performance. The report, called “Becoming a Nation of Readers” concluded:

“"The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.”

Trelease goes on to note that:

“….the experts were saying reading aloud was more important than worksheets, homework, assessments, book reports, and flashcards. One of the cheapest, simplest, and oldest tools of teaching was being promoted as a better teaching tool than anything else in the home or classroom.”

How does this work?

First, reading aloud to a child builds an association between the act of reading and pleasure, comfort and love.

Secondly, reading is a skill that improves the more it’s practiced. The more we share in the act of reading with a child, the more exposure the child will have to books. Their vocabularies will expand, their attention span will grow and, of course, the more time spent reading, the less time spent in front of the television and other activities that contribute nothing to a child’s intellectual development.

And don’t forget, reading aloud can be fun for adults as well.

Admit it: one of the most enjoyable things about being a parent is the secret thrill we all get in reliving our own childhoods. We get to sit down on the floor and just play – and it’s okay. We get to throw balls, build sand castles, and (if we’re brave) jump rope.

We also get to revisit, without embarrassment, the books that meant so much to us as a child. We can read them in dramatic voices and act out our favorite scenes. We can haul out Make Way for Ducklings or Charlotte’s Web and enjoy them once again, doubly so now, since our pleasure is shared. We can hand over our well-worn copy of Harriet the Spy or whatever our own favorite book was and wonder what moved us to read it fourteen times and what that says about our childhood hopes, dreams and sense of ourselves.

Sharing our favorite stories is a particularly lovely way to share ourselves with our children. Here is who I was when I was your age, we are saying. These are the characters who walked through my imagination. Let me introduce you.

In the process, we end up introducing ourselves.

One of the important parts of ourselves that we seek to share is our value system, our ideals, and our faith.

Sharing stories is one of the most effective ways to do just that.

We can teach and preach all day, but as we know from our tradition of faith, there is no more effective way to reveal the truth of God’s marvelous activity in the world and in an individual’s life is through sharing a story. It is how the faith comes down to us, and has, ever since the children of Israel listened to stories of the mighty deeds of God and then, when witnesses spread through the known world, telling stories of Jesus, the Chosen One.

And in the cool of the evening, cuddled on a bed, a couch or out on that porch swing, we parents have the gift and power to share that very true story of love with our children as well, at no cost to us except for time.