But we read that one last night

The question comes up more than any other, usually from a parent with the particular tiredness that only a four year old can manufacture. It goes like this. My child will only let me read the same book. Every night. The same one. Is something wrong, and how do I get them onto something new?

Nothing is wrong. Let me say that first and plainly, because the question always arrives with a little worry folded inside it. A child who wants the same story forty nights running is not stuck. They are doing something, and the something is more interesting than novelty.

Think about what the fortieth reading is actually like for them. They are not finding out what happens. They found that out on night two. By now they know the whole shape of it, every turn, the exact page where the wolf appears and the exact page where he does not win. And that is the point. The story has become a place they can walk into with the lights off and not trip over the furniture. In a day that was full of things they could not predict, they get to end it inside the one story where they know precisely how it goes.

There is also a quieter thing happening, and you can catch it if you listen. Somewhere around the twentieth reading they start mouthing the words half a beat before you say them. A page or two later they are saying them with you. Give it another week and they will correct you, sharply, if you skip a line to save time, and you should never skip a line to save time, because they are not being fussy. They are reading. Not the way you read, not yet, but they have got the words and the pages married up in their head, and that marriage is the whole beginning of it.

So my advice, for what it is worth from someone who has never once minded reading a book again, is to relax and enjoy the tyranny while it lasts. Read the same one. Read it exactly the same way. Do the voice, the one you regret starting, forever.

And when they are ready for the next book, they will tell you. It usually happens without ceremony. One night the old favourite stays on the shelf and a new one comes down instead, and you will feel a small pang you were not expecting, because the old book had become a bit yours too by then.

If you want to gently widen the shelf in the meantime, the trick is not to replace the favourite but to sit a new book next to it and let them choose. Choosing is the magic word. A book handed down is homework. A book chosen, even from a pile of two, is an adventure they decided on, and children, like the rest of us, will walk much further down a road they picked themselves.

Read the same one tonight. It is doing more than you think.

For the nights when the same one will not do, Bedtime Fables for Busy Parents has twelve five-minute fables to read aloud, written for tired grown ups and wide awake kids.