My advice for parents in helping kids select material is to first and foremost know your child. We all know that if we have more than one child, we know how individual each child is. If we were part of a family with more than one child. we know how unique we are from our siblings. What one book worked for this child won’t necessarily work for that child. What one book we may have loved as children won’t necessarily work for our kids. It’s about knowing our children and helping to fuel and to feed their individual passions.
There are clues from our kids as to how we can support that. For example, what posters are on your kids’ walls in their bedrooms? Who are his or her heroes? What are his hobbies? What does she most love to do in her spare time? Those activities, those heroes are clues to what they’re drawn to. My son is a baseball fan and a musician, and he loves baseball memoir. He also loves books about science and nature and so forth. My daughter is all fantasy, and if I were to give her a science story or a sports story, she would be bored to tears.
But give her something with princesses and fairies, she asks for more and more and more. It’s really about knowing our kids. It’s interesting, every year Scholastic does a wonderful survey, Kids and Family Reading Report, in which they assess some of the reading climate, and one of the things that came out of the most recent report is that something like 82% or 85% of kids say one of the reasons they don’t read more is they have trouble finding books they like.
We assume, particularly with older kids, that they know how to choose books for themselves, that a child should be able to go into a library or a bookstore and find something that interests them based on its cover or based on what they might read on the jacket flap. That’s not necessarily true. I think kids really need support and guidance in finding out what books work for them and what authors inspire them and what styles and what genres they respond to. A case in point is when my son had this free read experience that he was given the chance in school to have this free read and he was so relieved to be able to choose something he wanted.
He then was paralyzed with, “What do I choose? Anything, the whole world of books is now available to me. Which one?” I could see that he was struggling so I said, “Well, tell me what would you ideally like it to be and then throw out some adjective or some ideas or some words so that I can get a sense. What kind of book are you thinking you’d like it to be.”
He said well, “I’d like it to be funny.” So, “Okay,” he said. “And I’d like it to be real, like realistic. Doesn’t have to be non-fiction but it’d be nice if it were sort of realish, memoirish. And I’d like it to have something to do with nature.” Then I had to put my thinking cap on and help him figure out something that had all of those components, and we settled on Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals because it’s funny and it’s a memoir and it’s full of stories about animals and it was just the right choice for him. It was wonderful.
But by himself, I don’t think he ever would have come to that choice or that decision. Now, we the parents don’t have to be the person to do that. There are librarians. There are teachers. There are wonderful resources of people out there to help us find those perfect books for our kids if we can understand what they respond to.
If we see that our child loves ballet, we can ask the librarian, “Do you have any great books about ballet and stories about ballets, backstage ballet stories?” Or if we know that our child loves baseball, “Do you have any great baseball memoirs?” And we can ask the librarian to ask our child pointed questions, leading questions to help figure out what might turn them on as well. There are a number of ways that we can help lead kids to books they love. I think the task is that we have to remember that they need us to do that and that we can’t expect them to just know what they love right off the bat.
