The Dad Diaries: TikTok Is Why I Read To My Daughter

When my daughter, Scout, was about six months old, I started reading to her almost every night. She would just lay there, as cute as a cherub can be, and I would sit next to her and read out loud.

Some nights, I’d read her a classic children’s book like Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise. Other times, I would read whatever I felt like reading myself — perhaps a soliloquy or two from Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

But it didn’t matter if I was reciting the sing-song sentences of a limerick, or if I was recounting the gory Shakespearean bits where Macbeth doth brutally “unseam’d” the treacherous Macdonwald “from the nave to the chaps”. It was all gobbledygook to her six-month-old ears.

I read to her every night because I like to read. And of course, I had secretly hoped that my incessant reading out loud in her general vicinity would somehow make Scout super-smart and a lover of String Theory — all the things that I’m not. 

Every early childhood researcher and teacher will tell you the same: Reading to your child will help develop their language and cognitive ability; it will galvanise their imagination; and it can even stimulate their sense of empathy. (Note to all fathers: It is very important to encourage your child’s largesse in anticipation of all the future stupid mistakes Daddy will surely make). 

And if nothing else, experts tell us that regularly reading with your child forms a bond that even a valiant Macbeth could not cleave with a sword. 

Now, almost six years later, our pre-bedtime book ritual has persisted, and at her nightly behest, no less. Well, she doest protest hotly when I try to sneak in the ole MacBeth again, but will be readily soothed by repeated readings of Esther Averill’s Jenny and the Cat Club.

Like most fathers, I really wanted to believe that my child’s enthusiastic adherence to our reading routine was an early indicator of academic intelligence. She loves books so she must be book-smart, right?

But I am starting to realise that her love for books has got less to do with smarts than it does with stories. In other words, what Scout – and just about every sentient being – really loves is to dig into a good story. Which is really comforting… and also a little bit frightening.

Comforting because we have successfully matched something our kids like (i.e., stories) with something we would like for them to do quietly (i.e., reading). Perfect!

But stories don’t just exist in books. They also live on screens: on TV shows; in movie theatres; and they also exist as a mindless stream of shoddily cobbled and factually suspect YouTube videos.

And then of course, there’s social media. I mean, what is social media if not merely an uneventful stream of personal story snippets created by quasi-strangers? Hello, Instagram Stories.

So whether it’s a book about the fracturing of a secret boho-beach commune (The Beach by Alex Garland), or a TV show about lifeguards schlepping about on the Californian sand (Baywatch starring David Hasselhoff), or a jump-cut TikTok compendium featuring a girl’s day out on Tanjong Beach (just pick one), we love them all and lap it up because they are stories. (And also because they all feature bikinis prominently, for some inexplicable reason.)

But if social media has become the storyteller du jour, then as a father, I’m a little worried.

I’m worried that Scout will inevitably grow more interested in sparkly social media stories about good-looking peers, than she would be about pretty princesses imagined through the weathered pages of a book. Yes, they’re not all that different, I know. And I’ll also admit that lousy storytelling isn’t the monopoly of TikTok and other social media platforms either – there are plenty of godawful e-books out there being circulated with a virulent vigour.

You’ve probably heard the usual comparisons between the benefits of a book and the scourge of insidious screen time for children. It’s hard to contest the research when, as adults, we suffer first-hand all the pangs of mobile-phone maladies. But beyond that, I’m also considering that I might not want Scout to get stuck on and sucked into stories of any kind – whether by lauded writers or a fetching content creator. I want her to be able to extricate herself from a story, no matter how exciting, and come back out readily into the real world (where her dinner is getting cold).

And therein lies the difference for me.

It just feels that much easier to close a book and put it down, than it is to toss your iPhone into the sea off Tanjong Beach. 

So I will continue to read to now-six-year-old Scout, for as long as she would beseech me. And when it comes time for her to pick her poison of choice, I hope that our literary sojourns might somehow steer her towards a book and away from vertical videos. That when she starts to feed her own need for stories, she will choose something she can readily walk away from, something with a compelling narrative arc – like Quantum Physics for Dummies. 

Chia Bii Ming is an import/export manager and a father of one six-year-old. When not fathering his daughter or working a job, he spends his time trying to figure out the difference between IG Stories and IG Reels.