Latest news with #childhoodMemories
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It feels an almost holy moment': the beauty and magic of reading aloud to children
'So,' my father would ask, after the bath and the doing of teeth, as if the answer was unknown, 'what's it going to be?' 'Shady Glade!' 'Right! Shady Glade …' And sitting on my bed in our basement flat in London, for the thirty-third time, he would recite (and pretend to read), in exactly the same warm, alerting, storytelling tone, as if he had never seen them before, the first lines. He would have just done the same thing for my brother, now in a deep doze on the other side of the room, with The Gnats of Knotty Pine, while in the kitchen in my pyjamas I gave my nightly reading of Peter and Jane and Pat the Dog to my mother. His beautiful voice, which was soft and rich and clever, was the last thing I heard every day for years; being read to is the routine I remember best from my early childhood, before they split up, and we moved to Wales and our mother took up reading to us. The nights she gave us Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart were spellbinding. Dad was a broadcaster. Mum had been an actress. They were super performers. When my turn to read to my child came, I discovered all the pleasures of the bedside performance. One is the chance of escape through absorption. When Aubrey was small, I commuted between home in the Pennines and teaching in Liverpool, in more or less constant movement through the weeks, and only when I was working with students or reading to Aubrey was my anxious and tugging inner self stilled. And I can recognise that absorption and pleasure on my father's face when I think of him now. It's a particular time, reading to and being read to, a quietly magical time for a child, especially snug in your covers, watching and listening to an adult giving themselves entirely to entertaining you. Being an audience of two to the story of the book is lovely, too, a companionship something like equality across generations, across the gulfs between childhood and the adult world. Dad took us on boating holidays after the divorce; with the little cabin cruiser moored for the night, and the black Thames slithering under the keel, he set about EB White's Charlotte's Web, and Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child. Whenever he found a funny passage, his delight and amusement were beautiful; the cabin chimed with our laughter and snorted with giggles. Unlike me, Dad timed reading so that we heard a chapter or section and were then bid goodnight, kissed, and the light was turned off. When I began bedtime reading, to my then partner's six-year-old, Robin, I soon realised that the aim was not necessarily to entrance and delight, but to render unconscious. We did whatever Robin wanted, including Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and manuals on Bionicles (a race of plastic space robots with which he was in love), and Derek Landy's Skullduggery Pleasant. Michael Morpurgo's War Horse we met in our tiny studio flat in Verona, and also Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners, one of my favourites ever, which Dad had sent to me from London in the years when he was there, and we were up the mountain, with a note – I thought this might be up your street. Although I knew The Machine Gunners well, reading aloud is different, more powerful. In moments of this and War Horse I struggled not to cry, fighting not to embarrass Robin and break the spell. With even the most gripping books I found I could change gear, after the appropriate while, from an entertaining rendition, designed to engage Robin, to a soporific monotone, to knock him out. One evening in Verona we began one of David Walliams' books. The flat was a one-bedroom, and Robin slept on a sofa bed in the kitchen-diner. His mother, Rebecca, often curled up with him to listen, and often they both fell asleep. There is a time then that readers aloud know, when you raise your eyes from the page and look at some one or two you love most in the world, your now dreaming audience, and though you do not think it consciously, perhaps, the truth is that their gentle sleep is a gift you have helped, that night, to give them, and it feels an almost holy moment. When you read aloud to your partner or your child the room and the world beyond it seem to still, and the spirits gather to hear the story. Words uttered are more than words heard in the silence of the mind; they are things in the world, and the world responds. Sometimes, depending on where you live, in the hoot of an owl … Robin was six when I met him and about twelve the last time I read to him, so I knew something of what to expect and to try when Aubrey reached that stage. But I knew nothing about those first half-dozen years. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion It is the show-off, the actor in me, who loves reading to him so much, I know. But it is also a love of parenting in the root meaning of the word, a bringing forth, of the listener's attention, marvel, laughter and thought. Reading aloud is also a self-parenting, in the bringing forth of the voices, feeling, and tones from the reader. And it is a team sport, as it were, while reading to yourself is all about individual skill. Not all children love to read. They absorb narrative through talk and games and films and their friends and their YouTubers and that is fine, I learned, despite my initial panic when neither Robin nor Aubrey showed any great love of print. They still loved stories, and they loved being read to. If he was tired, Aubrey would ask me to read Mum's current Greek myth (Rebecca was teaching herself to be a Classics A-level teacher at the time) or switch to something 'not exciting'. This was the cue to put down The Hobbit or whatever for whatever I was reading, and, I noticed, writing. The knock- out drop of his childhood proved to be my own Down to the Sea in Ships – I don't think he has ever made it past the second page, and we have read it often – which was gratifying if not flattering. As he and his days grew longer, the knock-out was often all we had time for, though he excels at the well-timed question or thought, only partly designed to keep you talking and put off going to sleep. As is the way of memory, I expect Aubrey will recall more of these times, these nights, these books, as he grows older, if not perhaps as I remember them now, in great range and detail: he was only very young and going to sleep for most of them, after all. When we talked about this essay, I ran a few by him, to yesses, noes, and ums, until I said, 'Philip Hoare's whale! The Sea Inside!' 'I remember that!' he cried, immediately. No wonder. The writer is hanging in fathomlessly deep water off the Azores and a sperm whale approaches. The whale sonar-scans the man with his clicks, and the two creatures hang there, the great beast and the little being, as Philip describes the way a whale can make a cannonball of sound, a weapon to stun a squid, and the two look at each other in a kind of whale's peace. It is the most beautiful passage, and we read it night after night, hanging beside Philip and the whale in exactly the same place at last, in that wonder between life and sleep. This is an edited extract of an essay, The gifts of being read to, by Horatio Clare. It is featured in The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation, an anthology curated by Jennie Orchard
The Guardian
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘It feels an almost holy moment': the beauty and magic of reading aloud to children
'So,' my father would ask, after the bath and the doing of teeth, as if the answer was unknown, 'what's it going to be?' 'Shady Glade!' 'Right! Shady Glade …' And sitting on my bed in our basement flat in London, for the thirty-third time, he would recite (and pretend to read), in exactly the same warm, alerting, storytelling tone, as if he had never seen them before, the first lines. He would have just done the same thing for my brother, now in a deep doze on the other side of the room, with The Gnats of Knotty Pine, while in the kitchen in my pyjamas I gave my nightly reading of Peter and Jane and Pat the Dog to my mother. His beautiful voice, which was soft and rich and clever, was the last thing I heard every day for years; being read to is the routine I remember best from my early childhood, before they split up, and we moved to Wales and our mother took up reading to us. The nights she gave us Astrid Lindgren's The Brothers Lionheart were spellbinding. Dad was a broadcaster. Mum had been an actress. They were super performers. When my turn to read to my child came, I discovered all the pleasures of the bedside performance. One is the chance of escape through absorption. When Aubrey was small, I commuted between home in the Pennines and teaching in Liverpool, in more or less constant movement through the weeks, and only when I was working with students or reading to Aubrey was my anxious and tugging inner self stilled. And I can recognise that absorption and pleasure on my father's face when I think of him now. It's a particular time, reading to and being read to, a quietly magical time for a child, especially snug in your covers, watching and listening to an adult giving themselves entirely to entertaining you. Being an audience of two to the story of the book is lovely, too, a companionship something like equality across generations, across the gulfs between childhood and the adult world. Dad took us on boating holidays after the divorce; with the little cabin cruiser moored for the night, and the black Thames slithering under the keel, he set about EB White's Charlotte's Web, and Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child. Whenever he found a funny passage, his delight and amusement were beautiful; the cabin chimed with our laughter and snorted with giggles. Unlike me, Dad timed reading so that we heard a chapter or section and were then bid goodnight, kissed, and the light was turned off. When I began bedtime reading, to my then partner's six-year-old, Robin, I soon realised that the aim was not necessarily to entrance and delight, but to render unconscious. We did whatever Robin wanted, including Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and manuals on Bionicles (a race of plastic space robots with which he was in love), and Derek Landy's Skullduggery Pleasant. Michael Morpurgo's War Horse we met in our tiny studio flat in Verona, and also Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners, one of my favourites ever, which Dad had sent to me from London in the years when he was there, and we were up the mountain, with a note – I thought this might be up your street. Although I knew The Machine Gunners well, reading aloud is different, more powerful. In moments of this and War Horse I struggled not to cry, fighting not to embarrass Robin and break the spell. With even the most gripping books I found I could change gear, after the appropriate while, from an entertaining rendition, designed to engage Robin, to a soporific monotone, to knock him out. One evening in Verona we began one of David Walliams' books. The flat was a one-bedroom, and Robin slept on a sofa bed in the kitchen-diner. His mother, Rebecca, often curled up with him to listen, and often they both fell asleep. There is a time then that readers aloud know, when you raise your eyes from the page and look at some one or two you love most in the world, your now dreaming audience, and though you do not think it consciously, perhaps, the truth is that their gentle sleep is a gift you have helped, that night, to give them, and it feels an almost holy moment. When you read aloud to your partner or your child the room and the world beyond it seem to still, and the spirits gather to hear the story. Words uttered are more than words heard in the silence of the mind; they are things in the world, and the world responds. Sometimes, depending on where you live, in the hoot of an owl … Robin was six when I met him and about twelve the last time I read to him, so I knew something of what to expect and to try when Aubrey reached that stage. But I knew nothing about those first half-dozen years. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion It is the show-off, the actor in me, who loves reading to him so much, I know. But it is also a love of parenting in the root meaning of the word, a bringing forth, of the listener's attention, marvel, laughter and thought. Reading aloud is also a self-parenting, in the bringing forth of the voices, feeling, and tones from the reader. And it is a team sport, as it were, while reading to yourself is all about individual skill. Not all children love to read. They absorb narrative through talk and games and films and their friends and their YouTubers and that is fine, I learned, despite my initial panic when neither Robin nor Aubrey showed any great love of print. They still loved stories, and they loved being read to. If he was tired, Aubrey would ask me to read Mum's current Greek myth (Rebecca was teaching herself to be a Classics A-level teacher at the time) or switch to something 'not exciting'. This was the cue to put down The Hobbit or whatever for whatever I was reading, and, I noticed, writing. The knock- out drop of his childhood proved to be my own Down to the Sea in Ships – I don't think he has ever made it past the second page, and we have read it often – which was gratifying if not flattering. As he and his days grew longer, the knock-out was often all we had time for, though he excels at the well-timed question or thought, only partly designed to keep you talking and put off going to sleep. As is the way of memory, I expect Aubrey will recall more of these times, these nights, these books, as he grows older, if not perhaps as I remember them now, in great range and detail: he was only very young and going to sleep for most of them, after all. When we talked about this essay, I ran a few by him, to yesses, noes, and ums, until I said, 'Philip Hoare's whale! The Sea Inside!' 'I remember that!' he cried, immediately. No wonder. The writer is hanging in fathomlessly deep water off the Azores and a sperm whale approaches. The whale sonar-scans the man with his clicks, and the two creatures hang there, the great beast and the little being, as Philip describes the way a whale can make a cannonball of sound, a weapon to stun a squid, and the two look at each other in a kind of whale's peace. It is the most beautiful passage, and we read it night after night, hanging beside Philip and the whale in exactly the same place at last, in that wonder between life and sleep. This is an edited extract of an essay, The gifts of being read to, by Horatio Clare. It is featured in The Gifts of Reading for the Next Generation, an anthology curated by Jennie Orchard
Yahoo
29-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
45 Photos Of Random '90s Things That Millennials Will Instantly Recognize At First Glance
oh-so-groovy '90s-meets-psychedelic graphic design on Fruitopia vending machines: nose full of slimy boogers on Double Dare that low-key grossed you out: Trace & Color coloring books that somehow made anything you traced look sloppy and like you did it with your foot: Slates, which your parents would usually get you for long car trips: the Forrest Gump: The Soundtrack, which your parents would play over and over in the car on those long car trips: the "Snapple Lady," who appeared in all of the company's commercials: parents having stacks of processing envelopes full of photos they got developed and never put in photo albums: having a kids' photo album that you filled with your favorite photos (aka whatever pics your parents gave you, usually if they had doubles): a ton of blank VHS tapes with covers that looked like this: all the extra labels that came with blank VHS tapes that no one would ever use: 11.E!'s Talk Soup hosted by John Henson, which was the old-school way to watch viral videos: school square pizza, which you always looked forward to having on Fridays, along with a chocolate milk: coarse sugar-coated orange candies (that you ONLY ever saw and ate at your grandma's): Jerry Springer Too Hot for TV! VHS tape that they would show commercials for late at night, and made you wonder what exactly was on it: Wendy's commercials that featured its founder, Dave Thomas: Lay's Wow chips that were made with Olestra and gave people diarrhea: Clearing House magazine stamps that came in the mail, and you would use to order magazines that you then would never pay for: instant coupon machines you would play with at the supermarket: Disney bubble bath bottles that doubled as toys: 2000 soap, which every mom loved to buy in bulk: and how your breath wasn't minty fresh until it felt like you had burned a hole in your mouth with it: giant 3D cutout displays stores would have just to announce the release of an upcoming album or movie: McDonald's cooler they would have at school functions filled with orange drink: the McDonald's drive-thru menus that were brown and beige and had crappy speaker systems: big Nature Sounds music displays inside Targets: gumball machines that Blockbuster Video would have near the exit of the store: the Blockbuster Video-branded popcorn that was next to the candy at the checkout counter: tickets you need to get from the video game section at Toys "R" Us and take to the cashier in order to buy the game: Toys "R" Us Geoffrey Bucks that you would get for your birthday or holidays, and made you feel "rich": touchscreen monitors inside of the Warner Bros. Studio Store that allowed you to paint Looney Tunes characters: and Ebert reviewing movies and either giving them a thumbs up or thumbs down. Then studios promoting their films with "Siskel and Ebert give it two thumbs up!": crossover episodes that made no sense but went hard: paper ghosts you'd make at school with Tootsie Pops, pipe cleaners, Sharpies, and the super rough tissues that the school provided year-round: metal jungle gyms that got super hot in the summer: Disney Store plastic shopping bags that looked like this and that you refused to throw away because they were so magical looking: Disney/ BeyondLeftovers / Via sandykat15 / Via the Mickey Mouse gift boxes the Disney Store used to have: jimsgems2012 / Via VinterestTreasures / Via rulers that didn't really make great stencils: to the Wonder Hostess Bakery Outlet to get Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and other pastries, all while taking in the oh-so-good baked goods scents: Jerry Cleveland / Denver Post via Getty Images, Bloomberg / Bloomberg via Getty Images Good Seasons dressing bottle that every family seemed to own. And which made you feel like a gourmet chef if your parents asked you to make the dressing — even if it was just pouring the seasoning packet in with oil and vinegar: this exact wooden salad bowl (with matching salad tongs) that your family would use to serve the salad in for dinner: torchiere floor lamps that got so hot that you knew better than to even get close to touching. Or looking directly at the lightbulb while it was turned on because it had the brightness of 10 suns: PlugIns when they used gel packets that would get all gooey and covered in dust: E. Cheese's colorful ball pits that always smelled like feet and were probably way more gross than you even realize: glow-in-the-dark stars you would put on the ceiling of your bedroom and would give you a mini-heart attack when they would fall on top of you in your sleep: lastly, always sitting very close to the TV because most TVs were relatively small with bad resolution:
Yahoo
27-06-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
Millennial parents want to give their children a '90s kid summer. What does that mean?
The '90s nostalgia that brought back cargo pants and flip phones is also fueling a parenting trend among Millennials called '90s kid summers. The idea is to recreate the core childhood memories of a typical summer in the 1990s, such as running through sprinklers, drinking from the garden hose and chasing after the ice cream truck. 'That's where you just open up the backyard, give them a garden house, let them go to town,' Kristin Gallant, the parenting expert behind Big Little Feelings, said in an Instagram video. 'Independent play, creativity, ride bikes and do that from sunrise until sunset.' Research shows that unstructured playtime helps build healthy bodies, increases energy and reduces tension and anxiety, according to the American Psychological Association. But it's not always possible to give children the perfect '90s summer in 2025, and parents shouldn't stress out about it, said Claire Vallotton, professor of human development and family studies at Michigan State University. The desire for a '90s kid summer is likely a reaction to a parenting culture that tries to overschedule kids with summer activities to optimize child development, she said. 'They are overscheduled and using technology too much," she said, and not spending time in nature like many of their parents did. 'It's a reaction that makes a lot of sense but trying to solve it all in one summer isn't going to work for either the children or parents.' Many parents who work full-time depend on structured childcare and can't be available for their children throughout the summer to bandage a scraped knee, she said. It's also important to find peers for children to play with outside and many families don't live in safe neighborhoods where other children live nearby. An Instagram user made a similar point in a comment on Gallant's video. 'Give me a '90s economy and '90s real estate prices and I'll see what I can do,' the user said. 'Living room' vs. 'bedroom kids: What it says about your family dynamic But even if there was a parent at home and the family lived in a safe and social neighborhood, Vallotton said the '90s kid summer may not make sense. If children aren't given unstructured freedom throughout the school year, they won't know what to do with it during the summer. 'You can't just have this over-scheduled, technology-saturated life for nine months of the year and then switch into this absolute freedom,' she said. 'We haven't prepared our children for that… It's going to make the children potentially more anxious.' Although a complete switch is ill-advised, Vallotton said there are ways for parents to ease their children into a '90s kid summer by slowly limiting screen time, promoting more outdoor activities and fostering opportunities for peer play with minimal supervision. In case you missed: Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell are embracing free-range parenting. What is that? But that may not work for every family and parents shouldn't feel pressured by a social media trend, she said. 'Social media is a tool for social comparison and self-judgment,' Vallotton said. 'I would challenge parents to take a '90s summer for themselves and pause social media use.' Adrianna Rodriguez can be reached at adrodriguez@ This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Parents want to bring back the '90s kid summer. What does that mean?
News.com.au
26-06-2025
- General
- News.com.au
Why Arnott's stopped making their iconic Honey Snap biscuits
When an iconic biscuit is discontinued, Australia takes it hard. We remember that day back in 2021, when Arnott's Lattice biscuits disappeared off supermarket shelves. Our food editors were so devastated, they promptly bought up all other Arnott's crackers to see if they could hack them into Lattice imitations. But there's one biscuit that disappeared long before the Lattice – decades ago, in fact. But hundreds of people are STILL demanding to know where the best bikkie from their childhood had gone. We're talking about Honey Snaps. Honey Snaps memories Judging by the multiple Facebook polls we've done about discontinued food products, it seems a LOT of Aussies miss Honey Snaps and have very happy associations with the thin honey-sweetened biscuit. When we approached our friends at Arnott's to explain the disappearance of this much-loved biscuit, even they had their own fond recollections of it. Their culinary chef Vanessa Horton said: 'I have lovely memories of my grandmother making a Honey Snap log for all our celebrations… dipping the biscuits in sherry for added yum!' Ditto, Vanessa. Honey Snaps: the story It's been so long since Honey Snaps were on supermarket shelves that we struggled to find evidence of their existence on the comparatively 'new' internet, but Vanessa says: 'They certainly did exist. They were originally produced at our Homebush site which is actually the site of the Arnotts head office today, but ended up being baked at our Marleston Bakery in SA. They were retired in 1998.' What did Arnott's Honey Snap biscuits taste like? Vanessa says: 'They were a very thin, delicate biscuit, dark in colour. When you bit into them they had a really nice honey flavour to them. I believe they also contained coconut, but it was the honey flavour and texture that everyone seems to remember.' I've spoken to some Aussies who remember dunking them in tea (they often disintegrated), while others loved them in their lunchbox. Some only ever had them at their grandparents' house. Which current Arnott's biscuit are they most like? Vanessa says that the closest biscuit is probably the Queensland version of the Ginger Nut (yes, there are different Ginger Nuts for each state, but that's another story) because they're both circular, dark-coloured biscuits. However, she adds that Honey Snaps were 'thinner so that the texture was more delicate'. From a flavour perspective, she likens them most to the YoYo (sadly only available in SA) because it's also sweetened with honey, but Vanessa says they're also a 'completely different biscuit'. So in short, Honey Snaps are irreplaceable (sob!) Are Arnott's Honey Snaps returning? The experts at Arnott's are always listening to what their biscuit-loving customers want, but unfortunately it doesn't look like you'll see Honey Snaps back on supermarket shelves anytime soon. Vanessa reveals: 'The Honey Snap was actually a bit tricky to manufacture… that is what led to it being retired.' Describing them as 'a real labour of love to produce', Vanessa adds: 'To start, due to the nature of the raw mixture the band they were cooked on had to be covered in semolina and continually greased to prevent sticking. Being a sugar cookie, [they] had to sit for five minutes after they were baked before they could be moved (a bit like a Florentine has to cool). So baking them was a slow, labour-intensive process. Over time, as the bakeries grew more efficient and demand for other biscuits increased, we needed more baking lines to keep up. That led to the difficult decision to retire them.'
