It’s already August! Sometimes, it feels as though time is flying. Sometimes, usually when my darling children are fighting (again) over something stupid (who pushed who off a cliff in Minecraft or who first grabbed the book they’ve both read 87 times), it seems to drag so unbelievably slowly that I consider finding a topographical map so I can locate the nearest volcano and yeet them into it.

But I cannot – I will not – refuse to give in on screen time. They already get more than I’d like, definitely more than they did back in the good old days of 2019 when we could go to the museum or the library or the coffeeshop up the road.

Except…

We’ve always made exceptions to the screen time rules for two things: talking to family and reading.

My kids are 10 and 8 and both perfectly capable of reading to themselves. That said, we’ve been reading to them since they were in utero, and they both still enjoy the 30-45 minutes a night we spend together as a family with my husband doing the voices and everything. (I take an occasional turn, but since I sometimes have to work late, he’s the more consistent performer.) My sister-in-law will read to them for hours over FaceTime, which has been a life saver over the years when we’ve needed to get something done or, during the last several months, when we’ve needed a break from one another.

Many people, however, don’t have that kind of support. What they do have, though, is Gotham Reads.

I learned about Gotham Reads during the program’s San Diego ComicCon@Home panel. Started by Ellen Goldsmith-Vein with assistance from Andrew Geller, Gotham Reads lets authors, artists, and celebrities choose their favorite children’s books for read-aloud sessions that are recorded and posted to the Gotham Reads YouTube Channel.

Guests have chosen all different kinds of stories, from Henry Winkler and Lin Oliver’s Alien Superstar to Selwyn Seyfn Hinds’s On the Night You Were Born, to Christina Hammond’s favorite, We Don’t Eat Our Classmates. Jane Fonda contributed Horton Hatches the Egg, Senator Cory Booker read The Snowy Day, and Kevin Bacon tackled Frog and Toad Are Friends. The possibilities are literally endless, and Gotham Reads has no intention of wrapping up anytime soon.

They do, however, intend to shift their focus as the school year gets underway. With their “feeling words” of possibility, travel, joy, comfort, connection, and empathy in mind, the program hopes to serve not only as a respite for parents and children and a place of solace but also as a stop for, and bridge between, students and teachers attempting to navigate strange, new educational formats.

Geller says that although they will continue to host story time on YouTube, Gotham Reads has also reached out to educators and administrators to find out what resources they feel will be of most use online and how to make those resources accessible to the most students. The program also plans to work with teachers to find innovative ways to bring more books to more readers of all levels and abilities both to help teach children necessary skills and to give them the building blocks for creativity – a healthy means of escape and the foundations of emotional intelligence and understanding of the greater world.

So give your child a story and yourself a few minutes to drink your coffee. I am 100% sure everyone will be better for it. And it’s not really screen time if it’s a book. At least, that’s what I tell myself.