This December, I explain why reading mysteries aloud with kids builds brains, strengthens families, and turns Christmas break into something better than screens.
This editorial ran in the Tuesday 16 December 2025 edition of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.
In elementary school I read my way through Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators Mystery Series, a set of books in the vein of The Hardy Boys but easier for younger readers. Instead of high school sleuths with cars and chases, you got three middle-schoolers riding bikes around Rocky Beach, solving cases from a junkyard headquarters. Before smartphones and streaming, these books offered suspense one chapter at a time and mysteries a kid could work to solve. I saved money from odd jobs and bought the hardback editions to build the set I loved.
Those same books have now made their way through two more Courtney generations. I read them aloud to my three sons when they were young. Eighteen months ago, my oldest grandson (now 8) and I set out to read all 43 books together—about 7,400 pages—night after night; we finished the final book last week. My next two grandsons (8 and 6) are working through the series with me as well, each tucked under my arm the way their fathers once were. The stories haven’t changed, but the readers have—and watching those books spark curiosity across generations reminds me how much power there is in something as simple as reading aloud.
Reading aloud starts paying off long before a child can read a single word. Babies and toddlers who are read to hear more words, more sentences, more ideas, and they carry that head start into school. Better grades matter, but so does the bond it builds between parent or grandparent and child. When you read a mystery series together, you both start caring about the same characters and working as a team to puzzle out each new clue. As the kids get older, we take turns: I read one chapter, they read the next. The story becomes a shared world and the time a shared memory.
In 2003, my then 12-year-old son and I stood in line for the midnight release of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, then took turns reading aloud to each other until we couldn’t keep our eyes open. The book was wonderful, but the time together was even better. We still reminisce on it.
Research puts numbers to what reading families already know. In our case, The Three Investigators were first published in the 1960s, so my grandsons keep bumping into artifacts from a vanished world: phone booths, phone books, collect calls, rotary phones, reel-to-reel projectors, tape recorders, and paper maps. I even bought a Rand McNally Road Atlas to show them how to read street maps, find a highway, and trace a route without a blue arrow on a screen. We stop and talk about it and often pull up a YouTube clip so they can see how a pay phone worked or why a tape recorder needed two spools.
Sometimes the stories push us off the couch. When The Investigators strapped on scuba tanks in The Secret of Skeleton Island, my grandson wanted to scuba dive, so he attended a PADI “Bubble Maker” class. He suited up with tank, BCD, snorkel, and mask, and spent the session one-on-one with an instructor underwater. The book gave us a reason, and the shared experience gave us new memories. That is the quiet power of reading aloud: it doesn’t just build skills; it builds a shared life.
People sometimes ask what we’ll do now that we’ve finished all 43 books. The answer is simple: keep reading. I’m working through Nancy Drew with my granddaughter. My grandsons and I will tackle The Hardy Boys next, then head into bigger worlds together: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. There are so many stories waiting for us, so many worlds to explore. The goal is a rhythm of shared stories and memories that keep pulling us back together.
Reading aloud isn’t complicated, but it is powerful—and Christmas is a perfect time to remember that. School is out, the tree is lit, and kids suddenly have long stretches of free time. This Christmas, instead of handing them another screen, hand them a book; this Christmas, instead of drifting from one digital distraction to another, curl up and read a chapter together. When we read together—when we really read together—we hand kids language, courage, and comfort, and pull our families closer. The break will end, the decorations will come down, but the habit doesn’t have to, and neither do the benefits.