On reading "Goodnight Moon" for the 87th time

My daughter is two and a half. We have read Goodnight Moon roughly 87 times. I am not exaggerating — I started a tally in March.

The first 20 times, I felt like a good parent. The next 30, I started skipping pages. By number 60, I tried hiding the book behind the radiator. She found it. Of course she did.

Then I read a study that changed how I felt about the whole thing.

Repetition isn't boring to them. It's how they learn.

Jessica Horst at the University of Sussex ran a now-famous experiment in 2011. Three-year-olds who heard the same story three times learned more new words than children who heard three different stories. The children who heard the repeat? They learned the words *better* and *kept* them longer.

The brain isn't seeking novelty. It's building scaffolding.

The "million word gap" is real, but it's not what people think

The American Academy of Pediatrics often cites a study suggesting children read to daily hear about a million more words by kindergarten than children who aren't. That number is striking. What's less talked about: the *kind* of words matter. Picture books contain about three times as many rare words as everyday parent-child speech (Montag et al., 2015). That's where vocabulary grows.

What I do now, on read number 88

- I let her "read" the parts she knows. She always does the "goodnight nobody" page in a whisper. - I sometimes get a word wrong on purpose. She catches me. She loves catching me. - I stopped feeling guilty about not reading new books every night.

She'll move on when she's ready. Until then, goodnight moon.

— Marco