Why Parents Should Read Poetry to Their Children

In just a few short lines, poetry can help a child ask—and begin to answer—life’s biggest questions.

Children who grow up with poetry grow up with richer vocabularies and deeper emotional capacities. Biba Kayewich

What do parents want most for their children? Life—in all its fullness and flourishing, that they might live in the best way and experience the best things. Well, poetry opens the eyes, sets the hair on end, and makes the fingertips tingle with sensation: It opens us to the world and the world to us, refining our emotional life and training our eyes to see what we would otherwise miss. This is one reason parents should read poetry to their children.

I can still hear the warm, measured voice of my father as he read a T.S. Eliot poem to the family after dinner one night. “Let us go then, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky.” The poem entranced me, enchanting my mind in the beautiful labyrinth of the words, words that were mysterious and urgent and sad and funny all at the same time. I didn’t understand much about the poem—it’s one I puzzle over to this day—but I felt I’d encountered a work of genius, a poem that spoke to me on a level that I hadn’t known existed.

My father—an English professor—knew just when to speak softly and when to make his voice grow loud as he read the poem. He knew where to pause and for how long. For me, his voice is forever linked to Eliot’s words. “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each … I have seen them riding seaward on the waves/ Combing the white hair of the waves blown back/ When the wind blows the water white and black.” Before my father read me the poem, I didn’t know about the places the heart and mind could go, and now I was the richer for knowing it.

This is among the most vital reasons to expose children to great poetry: it opens to them new intellectual and emotional worlds, teaches the heart how to grow, and helps them feel both deeply and well. As educator and literature professor John Senior put it:

 “The poet is the man who says ‘Look! Look! You never saw that before.’ And if you follow him, you will see much more than you would have seen by yourself. In doing so, you have enlarged your capacity to experience the world, which is another way of saying to live.”

A New World of Words

Poems are the perfect way to introduce children to the world of great literature. They are short, intense linguistic masterpieces that concentrate an immense amount of emotion and insight into a small package—like a magnifying glass focusing sunlight into a powerful beam. Because many great poems are short, children can easily pay attention. They get small doses of superb linguistic magic that begin to teach them about the fundamentals of the literary arts: imagery, rhythm, metaphor, emotion, and description.

Poetry gives them an ear for good writing that will not only help make them discerning readers throughout life but also lay the groundwork for their own writing. Good writers have a good ear for the language, and poetry helps develop that ear.

Perhaps more importantly, great poems introduce children and youth to the big questions about life and human destiny. As Robert Frost said in a 1931 speech, “Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, ‘grace’ metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have.” Arguably, the Great Conversation in Western civilization about the meaning of life and death begins with the poetry of Homer.

After arguing that all human study and human connection depend largely on metaphor and comparison, Frost concluded:

“Unless you are at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness. … You are not safe with science; you are not safe in history.”

Poetry helps children learn about metaphor, a fundamental tool of communication in all areas of life.

Linguistic skill forms the foundation of all education since everything we learn is communicated through language, even if the subject matter isn’t literary. Research from the University of Washington indicates that a child’s proficiency in vocabulary and grammar predicts future success not just in language but also in other academic subjects. The study looked at a large set of school readiness skills to determine which was the biggest predictor of success, and it found that language ability stood head and shoulders above the other factors.

According to the research lead, Amy Pace, “A lot of other research focuses on math, science and literacy, and they don’t even consider that language could be playing a role,“ she said. ”But really, it emerges as a strong predictor across subject areas.” The child with a great command of English will probably fare well in a math class because they will have the linguistic tools to understand the concepts involved, whereas the math whiz may be unable to translate that numerical type of thinking to other classes.

Research suggests that exposure to poetry greatly aids children’s language development and emotional well-being. According to “Reading Magic” by Mem Fox, literacy experts have discovered that children who know eight nursery rhymes by heart by age 4 will be among the most skilled readers by age 8. Furthermore, a 2021 study found that children aged 8–17 undergoing hospital stays showed marked improvement in symptoms of sadness, anger, worry, and fatigue after engaging in poetry reading and writing exercises. Poetry can help children process difficult emotions and maintain better mental health.

My own poetic journey has come full circle because I’ve started to read poems to my family after dinner, just as my father read to me. I hope to help my children build language skills, a love for words, and an ear for harmonious sounds. But even more importantly, I hope that the half-remembered lilt of my voice and the half-remembered words of Tennyson, Keats, Eliot, Frost, and Dickinson might follow my children throughout their lives, as my father’s voice has followed me, like a gentle undercurrent to the unpredictable tides of life, pushing them toward the good and beautiful.