In praise of a book at bedtime

There have been several surveys in recent weeks "revealing" that fathers tend not to read to their children. This is hardly big news: everyone knows that men are useless. But while surveys of this sort should always be treated with kid gloves - on the grounds that it is easy enough to find statistical evidence for almost any prejudice we wish to confirm - in this case, the findings are pretty consistent. The last few decades of British life have seen a grand shift in th#e relative positions of men and women, but among the most durable of the old ideas is the one that presumes the raising of children to be, give or take a chore (or a cheque), women's work.

It is a shame, and not least for boy children. One of the motives behind the recent call for more men in nursery schools was based on an appreciation of the way in which boys learn a bad formative lesson in their primary years. The key thing about women, they are subliminally taught, is that you leave them behind. Boys progress through woman-dominated childhoods into the grown-up world of men, which looms like some remote mountain peak. A similar argument agitates the world of children's stories: if boys are read to mainly by women, we cannot be surprised if they later conclude that reading is a girlish habit they had better drop.

I am biased, naturally#. People connected to newspapers have an emphatic vested interest in the creation of young readers. And as someone who used to read daily to his children, but these days - ach, office hours - hardly ever does, I barely feel entitled to a view. Still, reading is almost certainly the most important part of any youthful education. The very existence of all the surveys shows that most of us take it as, um, read that reading is virtuous; one of the sharpest indicators of world poverty is the child literacy rate.

As it happens, reading is even more important now, as the info-tech boom continues to prop more of us, for longer and longer, in front of word- filled screens. In the near future we will do our shopping by reading, book our holid#ays by reading, handle (or mishandle) our finances by reading, and chat to our friends by reading. E-mail and the Internet are busily restoring to us the once-endangered habits of reading and writing. Computer literacy is an authentic form of literacy.

Not that reading is just a goody-goody way of getting high marks at school. All the best stories give you a bit of a shake. Our five-year-old boy was startled awake the other night by a dream in which he was being swallowed by a sea monster (there were some typical dream details - he was trapped in the time before he could swim, and had forgotten his armbands). And he couldn't go back to bed because every time he shut his eyes the monster came back. Clearly, it had to be driven away, and we drove it away with reading's close companion: writing. So at four in the morning he was writing an eager letter to Santa outlining what he had in mind for his Christmas stocking.

One can't be too cause-and-effect about dreams - no doubt there were profound underlying neuroses bubbling up. But in this case, there did seem to be a precise genesis for the dream. We'd recently been through Pinocchio, and the previous night had read the story of Jonah out of a book of bible stories (one can't be too cause-and-effect about the urges behind reading, either: these stories were bought on the back of the acute interest in Moses whipped up by the cartoon epic, The Prince of Egypt). Anyway, it was hardly surprising that a boy who sank towards sleep in front of a frightening picture - Jonah plunging into the murk, a shadowy monster rising to meet him - should find the image surfacing again a few hours later. Even the splashy last page, which showed a chirpy whale spitting Jonah onto a sunny beach, might not have been enough to quell the frightening scenes of incarceration that preceded it.

This was merely literature doing its job: making the pulse race, the heart beat faster, and the eyelids flutter. One would not wish it otherwise. The vocabulary of# childcare is still shot through with the assumption that children are one-dimensional possessions, chattels. We call them "kids" and talk about "rearing", for all the world as if they were livestock, something we might flog at the market in a hard winter or spit-roast if the fridge was empty. Perhaps we should turn this reflex to some better use. Maybe it would help if the late-home dads really did think of reading as nothing more than fattening, as the provision of food for thought.