I still read aloud to my secondary school child. She pretends to hate it. She doesn't.

My daughter is in S1. She is twelve. She is at an age where she has strong opinions about what is cool and what is not, where the opinion of her classmates carries significant weight, and where being a person who has her mother read to her is, by any objective measure, not cool.

I read to her last night. She complained that she was tired. I read anyway. She was asleep within twenty minutes of me starting — a sleep that looked different from her usual restless early-night — and when I tried to stop she said "don't stop yet" without fully waking up.

We have been doing this since she was three. The consistency of the practice across nine years has made it something that exists underneath the social register of cool and uncool — below the layer where adolescent self-presentation operates, in the part of her that was formed before she had an audience.

I want to make a case for reading aloud to secondary school children, because I don't see enough people talking about it and I think it's one of the genuinely useful things I've done as a parent.

Why reading aloud to older children is different from reading to young ones. When you read to a young child, you're doing several things at once: you're introducing them to language, to narrative structure, to vocabulary, to the experience of sustained attention. These are foundational. When you read to a twelve-year-old, the child can read independently and doesn't need you for input. What the reading aloud provides at this age is different: it's shared experience, it's a physical context of closeness and calm, it's a way of spending time together that requires nothing from them except presence.

The secondary school years are the years when children and parents often lose the easy physical closeness of early childhood. The reading becomes a proxy for that — a way of being together that doesn't require the kind of conversation teenagers sometimes find difficult. Many things that can't be said directly can be received through a story.

What we read. We have moved through genres over the years, following her lead. Currently we are in the middle of a Ursula Le Guin novel that she picked from a list I offered. Before this: some Terry Pratchett, some Philip Pullman, a brief and not entirely successful excursion into non-fiction (she liked a book about the history of maps; I loved it more than she did). The specific book matters less than the consistency and the quality. I read what I can read with genuine pleasure, because the pleasure is audible and she receives it.

The literacy argument. At S1, Hong Kong children face significant reading demands in English and Chinese. The ability to hold a long text in your head, to follow complex narrative threads, to hear how language can be beautiful or precise or funny — these things are developed by reading, including by being read to. Research on the effects of reading aloud to older children tends to confirm what felt intuitive: vocabulary, comprehension, engagement with reading as a pleasurable activity — all benefit.

The social argument. We know more about what she's reading, thinking about, and encountering through stories because we're reading together. Books generate conversations. Her response to a character's decision tells me something about her values. Her questions about plot tell me where her head is. We have had conversations prompted by fiction that I don't know how we would have had otherwise.

The resistance. She has at various points declared herself too old for this. She has complained that she'd rather read herself. She has sat with the specific adolescent body language that means "I'm tolerating this against my better judgment." I have read through all of it. The complaints have never required me to stop — they're a performance of appropriate developmental separateness, and the "don't stop yet" at the end of the performance tells me what she actually wants.

You can do this with a secondary school child. You can do it with a ten-year-old. You can do it in Cantonese or in English or alternating. You can do it for twenty minutes before bed when everything else is done.

It is one of the simplest and least expensive things I have done for my children. I tell other parents this at playgrounds and school events and they look at me with mild scepticism. I have run out of scepticism about this particular thing.

She pretends not to want it. She does.