There have been some really interesting articles on reading around the internet lately. I’ve seen one on reading ebooks, there was the one on the canon and the one about easy and difficult books. I’ve seen articles on YA books and several on books and children. The ones on books and children could be playing a match at the Australian Tennis Open for all the back and forthing. Do we crack down on kids and make them read? Do we let kids choose their own books?
Has there always been so much anxiety about children and reading? I don’t have kids so I generally don’t pay attention, but at the moment is seems to be particularly volatile. Personally, I agree with Max Ehrenfreund’s blog post at the Washington Post, If we stop telling kids what to read they might start reading again. There have been some recent surveys that suggest kids who get to pick their own reading material enjoy reading more and as a consequence, spend more time reading. Kind of a no-brainer, really. As an adult I wouldn’t want anyone telling me what to read, why do adults think kids would like it?
Now and then when I read one of those bookish memoirs of people who grew up with the gentle guidance of adults directing them toward The Iliad or Jane Eyre at the tender age of ten, I sometimes wish that had been my experience. But if I think about it longer than a few minutes and I consider what I was reading when I was ten, I’m glad I was left to my own devices.
About that time is when I began venturing out into fantasy and science fiction. I loved all things unicorn and Peter Beagle’s The Last Unicorn was totally awesome. And then I discovered science fiction with A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle and read it because it had a unicorn on the cover. But it turned out to be the third book in a series so after I read it I started at the beginning and wow science and space travel and time travel! I found these books on my own because my mom let me wander around in a bookstore and choose them for myself. Never once did my parents tell me what I could and could not read; never once did they frown at my choices and tell me I should be reading something else. They let me explore on my own and discover for myself what I liked and didn’t like to read. I got plenty of assigned reading at school, they didn’t need to give me assignments too.
My reading choices were an eclectic mix of age appropriate teenage angst novels by Judy Blume and generally adult fantasy and science fiction. Being able to choose my own books helped me develop into a self-confident reader willing to try any kind of book at least once. If my parents had ever told me I couldn’t read something because it was too easy or too hard or silly or any other way not right or good or appropriate, if they had put limits on me I suspect I would be a very different kind of reader today.
I appreciate what my parents did for me. I want kids these days to be allowed to have the same opportunity. Let them choose their own books no matter what those books might be. Let them explore and discover. It will help them love reading and it will help them be better readers because of that love.
I agree, I think reading books out of my own free will is so much more enjoyable then reading them because I am told to! Sometimes my parents simply recommend books to me that I can’t sink my teeth into them at first, so I leave them sitting in my bookshelf until I get curious and start reading. Those books are now some of my favorites, but I think that if my parents had actually forced me to read them, I would hate them! Thanks for sharing this.
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To live with all my might, exactly! I had adults recommend books to me too and sometimes I’d read them and sometimes not, there was never any pressure, he choice was still mine. I think that’s the best way to go. Thanks for you comment!
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I have a soon-to-be 16-year-old granddaughter and grandsons who are 12 and 13. As you probably would expect, my granddaughter is an avid reader and the boys find reading to be a chore. (I should mention that both boys suffer from dyslexia to one degree or another.) I tutor the youngest boy every afternoon for 2-3 hours and I’ve had him read aloud to me for twenty minutes an afternoon for the last three years or so. It’s a painful experience for both of us, and as a result, he started to see reading as just more homework…not something he would ever do for pleasure.
Then, about a month ago, he stumbled onto the Cirque du Freak series by Darren Shan in his English c;ass when his teacher read Book 1 aloud to the class. He just had to have Book 2…and read it in just under two weeks (you would know how big a miracle this is if you knew Matthew). He’s now well into Book 3 and has me scampering to find Book 4 – and the other 8 books in the series. Suddenly, he’s enjoying reading as it’s mean to be enjoyed and he looks forward to finishing his homework so he can work in 30 minutes or an hour of reading before bed.
Everything I tried to get him to read beforehand fell flat. So I’m a strong believer in exposing children to as many choices as it takes for them to finally find the one book that will “turn them on.” Now I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it “sticks” with him.
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Sam, what a wonderful story about Matthew! Once he gets to the end of the series I’m sure there is a good librarian at your local library who can recommend something else to try that he might like. He just might turn into a reader yet! It’s hard for kids with dyslexia, I have a cousin who struggled with it when he was a kid. So easy for the child and the adults to get frustrated.
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I agree! I don’t have any kids of my own, but i know I was never told what to read or not to read. I know my mom kept an eye on my reading ability and began introducing me to books like Nancy Drew, Anne of Green Gables and so forth when she felt I was ready for them. There was no push, but a “i read this as a kid, want to give it a try?” sort of attitude. From there though i would wonder the library freely and pick out anything that looked interesting.
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njmckay, keeping an eye and making “soft” recommendations like your mom seems to me exactly the right approach. My mom took me and my sister to the library regularly too and let us choose our own books whether we found them in the kids section or the adult section. I still have fond memories and I bet you do too!
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I’m not sure I agree.
Or rather, I think there should be some kind of combination, or balance, between steering them towards a certain direction and giving them space. Telling kids what to read may not be effective and may even cause counter-effects, as you say, but letting them have complete freedom may make them get into the habit of reading and enjoying only easy books, poorly written books, books of hardly more than entertainment value… and staying away from difficult, seemingly boring books that are actually great works of art. They may not even read books, but only comics, manga, magazines, or nothing at all. Reading is a habit that has to start somewhere, I know lots of people who never read anything as kids and read nothing now as adults. That is, I consider reading important, very important.
Call me a snob if you will, but books are not equal- there are standards, there are good books and bad books, books that stand the test of time and books that are enjoyed now and which will soon sink into oblivion, books that enrich the soul and books that do no more than help one pass the time. I don’t criticise people for enjoying some certain books, but I will not say that reading is good, whatever one is reading.
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Di, oh most definitely. That’s what school is for in my opinion. Teachers give reading assignments, etc. But for reading outside of school, on a child’s free time? I think they should be able to choose whatever they want to. And if they only ever choose comics or fast-paced plot heavy books for their own entertainment and enjoyment, there is nothing wrong with that. It’s better then spending the time watching TV or playing videogames. As adults we all read for different purposes and experience, why not allow kids to do the same?
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I’m thinking of general cases- I come from a country (non-Western, authoritarian) where, crazy as it sounds, schools don’t encourage reading. In the “literature” subject at school, we studied poems, short stories or excerpts and never, ever read a whole novel. In class, we were rarely introduced to great authors either, and there are other things in the literature class (which I’m sure you won’t believe) that can make the majority stay away from literature for pretty much the rest of their lives, unless their parents take a more active role or they, for some magical reasons, start reading on their own after hours of school and extra classes.
I’ve been thinking, for a while, about writing a post about the literature subject at high school in my country, but Westerners are unlikely to believe me, so…
Anyway, I don’t think that reading per se, whatever one reads, is better than watching TV per se. Wrote about it here: http://thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2014/09/i-dont-understand-some-peoples-idea.html
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Di, ah, it sounds like you have quite a different experience in school growing up than what school is like in the US. As for watching TV versus reading, I suppose it all depends on what you watch on TV. Most kids are not going to sit down and watch the History Channel or some other educational program. TV watching for the majority of children is a passive experience in which they are not required to be engaged or pay any kind of real attention. In comparison to that sort of TV watching, any kind of book is better because at least it requires attention, engagement and use of the brain and imagination. It is not a passive experience even if it is light, easy reading.
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I disagree with Di. The key, I think, is to see that kids read enough because that’s how they start to be able to tell good writing from bad.
I raised two readers and part of it was that Ron and I read to them a lot and they saw us reading. Part was that I took them to the library and we bought them books. I would recommend books sometimes, read what they were interested in with them so we could talk about it, and occasionally leave a book out at home so one of them would notice it. Not all of these methods are infallible, but together they tend to work more often than not on the kids I saw growing up with my two.
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Jeanne, good work on raising readers! I agree that if you give kids a enough of a variety of reading opportunities they will figure out for themselves what is good writing and what is bad. They tend to be smarter and more discerning than adults give them credit for.
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I agree with you so much! I wonder how school libraries are these days? I went to a very ordinary comprehensive school but they had a pretty decent library that contained a good and wide selection. I suspect those libraries have been easy targets for cuts. I do remember reading both comics and having a stabs at books like James Baldwin’s Another Country or Madame Bovary. Finding a selection of Orwell’s essays…well, that was like being immersed in the history of the 20th century. I think I was probably a fluent reader because I also enjoyed The Beano and The Dandy and Richmal Compton’s Just William books – entirely non literary reading.
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Ian, I suspect you are right regarding school libraries. In the US some schools still have them and others don’t, it all depends on where you live and how much money your school district has. Growing up, my school had one and my teachers took the class to visit them regularly.
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I agree 1000x! I grew up being allowed to read anything in a house full of books, with frequent trips to the library. Also, don’t tell kids when to read or how much (hope you don’t mind the link, but I recently wrote about that on my blog: https://everydayhas.wordpress.com/2014/11/16/i-dont-think-i-like-reading-anymore/ )
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everydayhas, don’t mind the link at all! My parents always ended up telling me I read too much and I needed to go outside and play. It only made me want to spend more time reading in order to defy them. Good thing they never told me what I could and couldn’t read or who knows what kind of crazy things I would have done! 😉
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Like you, I sometimes wish I’d had an adult guiding my reading a little more. I feel like there’s so much I missed as a kid because no one was around to suggest it. I just stuck to Judy Blume and similar. And I didn’t ever try “adult” books because I didn’t think I was supposed to. I stepped up to chapter books only because a librarian told me to–I was self-conscious about trying something that was more advanced.
Still, I wonder how I would have liked some of those books I missed. And because I was a child who was really eager to please adults, I wonder if I would have fretted about not liking things I was supposed to. As it was, I only read books I felt sure I’d like because no one paid attention and suggested anything else. Maybe they weren’t the best books, but I certainly established a habit of reading for my own pleasure. Something like what Jeanne describes might have been more ideal for me. It sounds like a nice middle ground between directed reading and near-total lack of guidance.
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Teresa, what a shame you didn’t feel like you could try adult books when you were a kid. But at least you were still able to establish the habit of reading and enjoyed it. I had adults giving me books all the time as gifts so I guess I can’t say I had no guidance at all, but it did feel like I was on my own though always with encouragement and approval. I think it helped that one of my closest friends was as much a bookworm as I was and we were constantly trading books and egging each other on.
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I dont think children should read whateve they want because not every book is appropriate for a child nor on their reading level. Choice of books for children is very important in their reading development.
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Fran, I can see where you are coming from. You certainly wouldn’t give a kindergartener Lord of the Rings to read. But at the same time telling a child she can’t read a book because it is too old for her does her a disservice in telling her you don’t trust her abilities or her judgment. I know from experience reading adult books when I was a kid that a lot of the “adult” parts of the books went right over my head. 🙂
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I agree with you, Stephanie. I grew up in a house with books, although, oddly, I don’t remember seeing either of my parents reading. My mother took me to the library regularly when I was fairly young, and, when I was about 13, a neighbor got me interested in volunteering at our local library. I was free to read anything in the library – and I did. While shelving books, I found books on earth sciences, by Thomas Hardy, books on mushrooms, philosophy, Sarah Bernhardt. It was like a banquet. I’m not sure I understood half of what I read, but I’m still trying to read everything that piques my interest. The summer reading lists we were given in school were vast enough to include old books, new books, and books of many genres. I come down firmly on the side of ‘let kids read what they want to read’.
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Joan, how fun you got to volunteer at the library when you were a kid! It’s funny, my house was full of books too but I remember only seeing my mom reading a book now and then and my dad only ever read the newspaper. But both of them read to me and my sister when we were little and then we read to them. In fact, it seems like any family gathering involved reading to one relative or another and then having them be amazed at how well I read. Did I ever soak that up!
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My father gave me an ultimatum when I was in the 5th grade–no more Nancy Drew unless I broadened my reading. Our weekly library visits found me in the adult section, and I discovered ancient Egypt and Greece and Rome in the history and archaeology aisles. I chose large books with loads of pictures to accompany the text and fell in love. My mother just let me read her books; she loved historical fiction, which worked well with my new interest in history. I still read some Nancy Drew, but also Gone with the Wind, Exodus, and books about Greek architecture and Egyptian tombs, and later books about the Tudor period of England.
When my kids were young, I read and recommended many books for their age group. Now, I do the same for my grandchildren. It is easier when they tell me what they have enjoyed, and then I can read and recommend in those genres.
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Jenclair, that’s pretty funny about the ultimatum from your dad! Firm encouragement to broaden your reading horizons 🙂 I always love giving books as gifts to kids who enjoy reading. It gives me a chance to remember the books that I enjoyed as a kid and share them. It’s also so much fun to talk with kids about what they are reading. They tend to be so enthusiastic!
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I’ve raised 3 children – all grown up now and all reading. One way a parent can instill the love of reading into children is to let them *catch* you reading regularly. Secondly, read to them every day from the very first days of babyhood all the way through the time they are reading on their own (or even beyond.) I never told them what they *should* be reading; and never selected their books for them. As toddlers, they picked out the bed-time books they wanted read to them. I was simply the narrator. What we *did* do was make good books available to them in our family library – which contained many of my childhood books (eg. Black Beauty, Heidi, Under The Lilacs, The Five Little Peppers) and celebrating the day they got their first library card. Making worthwhile books – with interesting cover art – available to them is important. Eventually, they’ll pick one up, and then another. Like anything else in raising children, you have to let them find their own way, be themselves, and trust them. Kids are pretty darn smart.
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Grad, I think reading to kids is really important. My parents always read to me and my teachers in elementary school wold read to the class after lunch. And definitely making books available is important too. I agree, kids are pretty darn smart and adults don’t trust them enough. Sounds like you did a fantastic job with your three!
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I see this is definitely a subject that is sparking debate. My kids are young still, but so far, the best way to get them to read is to read with them, to let them pick their own books at the library, and to pay attention to what they are interested in and suggest books based on that. I hope, in time, to introduce books that I have loved as a child and to encourage them to read books from my shelves. I loved browsing my parents’ library as a teenager, and I will do my best to pass on this love.
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My Book Strings, it sure is! I had no idea. It sounds like you have a good approach to reading with your children. My parents weren’t big readers when I was small but they did always read with me and my sister which I do think was very important.
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I grew up with a mother who guided my reading to the extent that she’d buy me good books as gifts, and she’d recommend books for me when I asked. But neither she nor my dad ever put limits on what I read, and they both read to us a lot, and took us to the library all the time. I was glad of the freedom and very glad to have a mother who would put Jane Eyre in my hands before I knew to want it.
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Jenny, I frequently got books as gifts from my parents and other family members so I guess in a way that was a sort of guidance. I had a best friend who was also a reader and we always passed books back and forth. Her grandmas had been in education and often gave her books suggestions which then got passed on to me but it always felt like I was the one doing the finding and choosing which is kind of weird now I think about it.
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It sounds like we had similar experiences with reading while growing up. My parents let me choose all my own books, never told me to read something or not, and I have always loved reading! I sometimes wish I had had that extra guidance and feel like I missed to many classics that I probably should have read as a child, (I admire people who say they read Jane Eyre at ten for example…while I was busy with Nancy Drew!! and Encyclopedia Brown!), but I can always read them now and probably will appreciate them far more! I think it is good to give books and offer suggestions for books that might be well received, but it’s more important to just encourage kids to read whatever they feel comfortable with and give them all the opportunities they need to read and pick their own books. (This from someone, too, who has no kids…but as I was once a kid…).
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Danielle, Yeah, I’m sure most of Jane Eyre would have whoosed right by me at age ten, not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it, I’m sure I would have but I’m glad I read it when I was older. I’m a big advocate of gifting books to kids. Family members did that for me when I was a kid and I’ve done the same to other kids in the family. It’s really fun once they start to have an idea of what they like and can tell you.
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Like so many others, I think it’s a question of finding a balance… The ideal seems to be having lots of books from which to choose, parents who are reading for pleasure themselves, and recommendations and guidance when you want it rather than being compelled to read this or that. Even so, my mother often suggested books to me when I was a child and for many years I totall resisted all her ideas, although I knew that she was right and I would like them, children can be peverse. But I always read a lot, and nobody ever discouraged me.
As I recall, even Virginia Woolf said one should read a lot of crap (perhaps not in those precise words) in order to cultivate a sense of discernment; I went through a stage of reading nothing but Famous Five books until suddenly, one day, I realised that all the plots were the same and I was bored with them. I moved on. But really, does it matter so very much if you don’t move on? We are lucky enough to live in a society where you can acquire a sense of the beauty and complexity of life from art, music, film. It doesn’t have to be books. By which I mean. I am not sure that everyone has it in them to be an ardent reader and maybe, as long as they’ve been exposed to books and are literate, that’s not necessarily so awful? As long as there is some other art form, I mean, which they do enjoy.
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Helen, heh, yes children can be perverse! And you are right, as readers we want everyone to be readers and anyone who turns up their nose at it has something wrong with them. But there are plenty of other ways to “acquire a sense of beauty and complexity of life” as you so nicely put it. Reading can be a force for good but it isn’t the only one. Thanks for reminding us of that!
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I tried forcing some books on my daughter when she was younger, but ultimately, I couldn’t make her read a book she just wasn’t interested in. So while I’m sometimes mystified that the reading gene isn’t expressed in her to extent it is in me, I’m still awed that she does discover her own reading material, via her friends and browsing in stores or libraries, and it’s very definitely an extension of her own personality and interests.
Also, at her school they have 30-40 minutes’ free reading time daily (comic books NOT allowed) — she just doesn’t feel like reading MORE when she gets home.
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Isabella, I can imagine how hard it must be when your child doesn’t enjoy reading as much as you do. But at least she does enjoy it on her own terms and that’s something! How wonderful her school has a free reading time every day.
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My earliest memories of books are of my Dad reading out to me from big colorful books….I do not recollect point however I began to read on my own and choose books myself…I think my dad bought me some Enid Blytons and let them be and I just discovered them by my self. That’s also how I discovered Robert Louis Stevenson, Alexander Dumas etc…My parents did guide my reading in the sense, in the early years, they selected books for me which they had enjoyed themselves as kid. However the choice of whether I wanted to read what they read was completely upto me because, i grew to love a lot of authors that were hand-me-downs. Forced reading is never of any help! Also i do believe that children who see books around them while growing up and parents who read, pick up the habit at the very infancy. It’s kind of hard that when you have never read a thing, to try and force books on your child!
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cirtnecce, I think reading to children is very important. I loved being read to and I love reading to kids whenever I get the chance which these days is pretty much never. I also like to ask kids who are reading to tell me about their book and they get so very excited and talk so fast it’s hard to keep up. And you are right, availability seems to be key too.
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Hear, hear! My parents didn’t pay any attention to what I read, except when they were reading favorites of theirs to me, which I always loved, because they did. I would be so heretical as to say that even in school kids should be allowed to choose what the read. I was so bored by most of what we read in high school because it was all about experiences I hadn’t yet had. I didn’t come to enjoy the classics until I was in college (and beyond), and it still happens to me. There are books I tried to read in my twenties and hated that I loved when I gave them another go in my forties.
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Emily, I think sometimes in high school the classics are done a disservice by the way they are taught. Teach them is a way that picks up on things kids can understand and relate to and I believe they become less boring. I thought the Scarlet Letter was delightfully twisted and I loved Old Man and the Sea because it made me think of my grandpa. However, until I was into my 20s I had trouble with anything that had lots of irony in it. It was something that took me a long time to understand because I think that sort of understanding is based on experience. So I do agree with you, mostly 🙂
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Here, here! I also had no restrictions on my reading and the result was not only that I became a lifelong bibliophile, but also that my literacy level was always well above my peers’. If I had kids, I would see my job with regards to my kids’ reading habits would be only to make sure they had as much to choose from as possible. BOOKS EVERYWHERE! Which, er, is exactly the way things are at my house already…
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Colleen, heh, the books everywhere plan sounds like a good one and very easy to implement 😉
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I grew up in a house with books in every available space, and no one ever told me that I could not read something. And no one ever restricted the titles I could bring home. It was rare that new toys came home but if we were in a bookstore there was no such thing as “no.” I read many classics and things above my reading level that I did not completely understand but when I read it again later, I had the pleasure of discovering new things. Books grew with me.
As an educator, it is painful to me to restrict kids reading. “Is that your level?” as if the whim of the moment in reading can be regulated like that and still have kids feel joy in reading and its possibilities. I fight against it wherever I can but… The whole things makes me sad for kids.
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The biggest thing I remember about elementary was the constant war I was in with my librarian and teachers. I was a third grader checking out the books reserved for advanced fifth graders and that was just unacceptable. It was the beginning of me haunting bookstores and buying my own material. It took a long time for me to feel comfortable in libraries again, I always felt like someone was going to bark at me and tell me no. I couldn’t get enough Jane Austen and Charles Dickens…
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Anakalian Whims, oh what shame! I wish you could have had my teachers and school librarian, they were always giving me books to read far above my grade level because they knew I could and would be terribly bored otherwise. I’m glad the experience didn’t dampen your enthusiasm for reading!
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Frances, So glad to hear an educator doing what you do! “Books grew with me” I like that and it was true for me too. I usually read beyond my age and like you would not always completely understand but it doesn’t matter. How can kids learn anything if everything they do is something they can immediately understand? Keep up the good fight! 🙂
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Your blog-posting reminds me of my own childhood. I always loved to read… as soon as I discovered reading I just went crazy with reading. I would return from the Regent Park Library with an armload of books, and they weren’t always for kids. I recall coming home once, maybe at 8 years old, or thereabouts — and in my stack was The Sinking of the Bismarck. My parents started to worry about me, mostly my dad — thinking I was not normal.
Then once my mom and I were in an old used bookstore, stacked to the ceiling with books, and again, I could not have been more than 10 years old. She told me I could choose two books. I got a Star Trek one by James Blish [OK, that makes sense]… but then also, The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn.
Kids. Give them books. And set them free!
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Cipriano, oh your story is delightful! My book choices were not quite so obviously worrisome for my parents, or if they were, they didn’t let on! I went for books like Watership Down when I was seventh grade and was well into Scifi like Brave New World and Andromeda Strain by then too. But I’d grab for anything that sounded like a remotely interesting story, the bigger and more perilous the adventure, the better! So did you read Gulag Archipelago when you were 10?
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I think there’s way more anxiety about kids reading than is necessary. I used to think that most kids didn’t read, that they were all caught up in video games, etc. But the longer I work at a bookstore, the more I venture out with my own child, and the more I pay attention to the stories making it to the big screen, the more I realize that kids these days actually read more than the kids I grew up with – not more than me, but I was a bit of a reading weirdo. What they’re reading might not be quality work, but they ARE reading. Look at Twilight, Percy Jackson, The Mortal Instruments, etc. etc. The kids are reading this stuff long before it makes it to a film. And then once the film is out, the ones that didn’t read it are coming in to catch up to the trend. They’re still burning the crap out of their eyeballs because they’re not just reading books the way we did… they’re reading them via their iphones much of the time… but the point is, they’re still reading, not just as much as we did but possibly more. Somewhere between my nerdy childhood and the kids of today – reading got cool.
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Anakalian Whims, Yes, I think you are right, kids are reading more these days than we give them credit for. Like you I was a reading weirdo too, always had my nose in a book, so would never compare what is “normal” reading activity to what I did either! But when I was a kid not many of my friends spent free time reading at all. So yeah, way too much anxiety about kids and reading.
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I agree in principle. Let kids choose what they want to read – with some provisos. Schools should introduce them to a range of reading and should try to do it in a way that encourages them but that also pushes them a little out of their comfort zone. And, for as long as you read aloud to your children there should/could be some negotiation because adults can often read aloud something the child may not read themselves but end up greatly enjoying when read by someone who loves it themselves and/or can read it in a way that brings it alive. Generally though, the best way to encourage reading is to let people read what they want. I read a lot of Enid Blyton as a child and I don’t think it ruined me!
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whisperinggums, oh yes, schools should provide the structured reading, the range of kinds and difficulty, the lessons on how to read, the books a kid would not choose on her own. But for free time? Kid’s choice. Oh I’m sure you were completely ruined by Edith Blyton, but in a good way! 😀
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