The moment a child can read on their own, the reading aloud tends to stop. Parents feel they have graduated out of it. The books leave the bedside table, the ritual dissolves, and both parent and child move on.
It is one of the more unnecessary goodbyes in parenting.
There is an assumption built into it: that reading aloud is a bridge, a way to help a child until they can manage the page themselves. Once they can decode the words, the bridge is no longer needed. But that treats read-aloud as a teaching tool, and misses most of what it actually does.
What changes when you read to them
A child reading alone is doing several things at once. They are converting letters into sounds, sounds into words, words into meaning, and meaning into sequence. For most children, those processes compete with each other well into primary school. A child concentrating on getting every word right has less attention left over for the feeling of the story.
When you read to them, you handle the decoding. Their attention is free for everything else: the characters, the tension, the moment a chapter ends badly, the satisfaction when something resolves. Listening comprehension, what a child understands when they hear something read well, tends to run several years ahead of their reading comprehension. You can read a book to an 8 or 10 year old that they could not yet manage alone, and they will follow every word.
The vocabulary question
Books for older children carry a wider vocabulary than the ones a child can read independently at the same age. When you read aloud, those words arrive with context and intonation, and with someone to ask what does that mean of, right there in the room. That is how a word actually gets absorbed. Not from a dictionary definition, but from hearing it used well, in a moment, inside a story that has your full attention.
Twenty minutes that belong to you both
Here is the part that has nothing to do with literacy. A read-aloud session is 20 or 30 minutes where a parent and child are sitting together doing one thing: following the same story, reacting to the same moment. By the time children are 9 or 10, most of their day is already sorted into school, peer groups, devices, and their own interior world. The window for this kind of close, unhurried attention gets smaller year on year, not larger.
Shared fiction does something for that relationship that is hard to replicate. You are both inside the same story. You know the same characters. At dinner the next day, your child says something about what happened last night in the book and you know exactly what they mean. That is a real thing, and it disappears if you stop reading together.
What to read past age 8
The books do not have to be picture books. By 8, you can start reading novels together, a chapter at a time. A medium-length children's novel becomes a few weeks of evenings. The right book is the one where your child asks you to keep going past the agreed chapter. That test has not failed us yet.
There are children's novels that sit at the outer edge of what a child this age would attempt alone: longer, richer, more complex. Those are the ideal ones to read together. The child gets the story they could not yet reach on their own. You get a window into what actually moves them.
Pick up a book tonight. See if they let you keep reading past the first chapter.