When one mother started a mother-daughter book club with five other mothers, she just wanted to make reading cool for the tweens. Little did she know the book club would help her bond with her tween daughters and open the lines of communication. Plus, tips for starting your own mother-daughter book club.
Books Open Doors of Communication with Girls
This is so cool,” said my 15-year-old daughter, Madeleine, as she donned a plush terry robe and prepared for her first massage. The two of us were with other members of our mother-daughter book club, celebrating five years together as a group with a weekend away and a pampering day at the spa. Not one of us could have imagined ourselves in this place when we met for the first time.
All we were trying to do then was create a place to foster a love of books and to counteract the ‘uncool’ label reading was getting from some of the girls’ fourth-grade classmates. Six moms and six daughters gathered together one school night and decided to make it cool for us. Ironically, our biggest challenge in the beginning was setting aside enough meeting time to talk about what we had read. We met over dinner, and the daughters always wanted to play after eating before we gathered together for a discussion. And the moms lost track of time while talking about issues the girls were facing in school or trading names of orthodontists or sharing ideas for great family vacations. Eventually someone would notice the time and round everyone up for dessert and book talk.
Madeleine and I loved our prep time for meetings. I always read the selection out loud to her, and it created a special time for us to connect after a busy day at school before she tackled homework. It was also a calming ritual that we looked forward to at bedtime.
Often Madeleine and I would have our best discussions when just the two of us were together in the car driving home from a book club meeting. It seemed easier for her to bring up problems with friends or worries about school when she had read about fictional characters with similar experiences and heard what her friends and their moms had to say about the issues.
When the girls entered middle school they began to select books with female characters around their age who were beginning to date. And there was a mini-crisis in our club when the first book portraying a young girl having sex appeared on our reading list. Many of the moms were afraid that reading books about teenage sex would be an endorsement of behavior we didn’t condone. Instead it gave us the opportunity to talk about emotional and moral issues that would have been difficult for us to bring up without the entrée a book discussion thankfully brought.
Around the same time, my younger daughter Catherine entered fourth grade and let me know it was time to start a new mother-daughter book club with her. I felt like a seasoned veteran as I planned this new group and began carving out time to read with Catherine on weekday mornings before school. We savored the quiet moments together before the hectic pace of the day began.
I was surprised at how different the personality of this second book club was from the first. The girls were not only interested in different books, the discussions often went in completely different directions than I expected. And Catherine surprised me most of all. Not one to easily share her inner thoughts, she freely talked about how she would react if she were faced with situations we read about. Our car conversations often centered around things I learned while listening to her talk at group meetings, and they have helped us become closer.
Our mother-daughter book clubs became so much more than just a way to make reading cool. The friendships we’ve nurtured there and the time we’ve spent talking about things that are important to us have enriched our lives in ways we never could have envisioned back then. I look forward to being equally surprised by the new ground we chart in years to come.
How to Start Your Own Mother-Daughter Book Club
1. Who will you invite? You may want to begin with a core group of two or three girls and their moms who each invite two or three others. This prevents one person being the only source of connection in the group and allows all participants to help ‘build’ the club. You want to have enough people for a good discussion even if some members can’t make it, but not so many that you’ll feel overwhelmed at a meeting. Try to make sure all the girls are at a similar reading level.
2. How often will you meet? Every month? Every other month? Will you take breaks during summer and winter vacation?
3. When will you meet? Early evening with dinner? After dinner for dessert? Weekend lunch? I’ve found that a consistent meeting time, like the first Monday or the third Thursday, makes it easier for members to put book club on the calendar.
4. Where will you meet? Decide whether you’d prefer to rotate between homes or find a public meeting place such as a community room at the local library.
5. How will you choose books? You may want to cultivate a relationship with a youth librarian at school or a community library, or check out websites such as kidsreads.com and teenreads.com for ideas. Ask girls and moms to choose reading selections together for the best success.
6. Perhaps start here. The Mother-Daughter Book Club by Heather Vogel Frederick (Aladdin) is a great first book club selection for girls aged 9-12: This story of four moms and their daughters in a reading group explores how moms and daughters don’t always understand each other, and how talking about books can help.
