Isn't Reading Supposed to be FUN?....
Oct 18 '00
When I was in a used bookstore some time ago, I overheard a conversation between a young girl and her father. The girl had found a book that she had absolutely positively fallen in love with on sight and wanted to get it. Her father, however, took one look at it and said, "Oh, no, you already have a book like that; let's get something else." He then proceeded to flip through other children's books, ignoring her as she told him again and again that she wanted THAT book and no other. Finally he selected a book, announced, "We'll get you this one," told her to put the book she wanted down, and lead her to the cash register.
I have very little doubt this child will NOT grow up to enjoy reading.
I have also heard of parents lamenting that their kids are reading nothing but books from the Sweet Valley High series, the Babysitters Club series, the Harry Potter series, the insert-name-of-book-series-here series. Sure, they're reading the books over and over again and clamoring for more, but they're not reading "classics," so their obviously eager reading habits somehow don't count. Sometimes these parents will even try to restrict access to the books that their children clearly are reading at a gallop.
Is it me, or does this opinion seem odd?
My mother was extraordinarily smart. She sensed that WHAT my brother and I were reading when we were growing up was not as important as the fact that we WERE reading, so she made very little effort to dictate what we should or should not read. Not that she ignored our reading choices entirely -- if either one of us had come home from grade school with a copy of THE STORY OF O or the like, she'd rule that out -- but she set no limits for us in terms of what she thought was age appropriate, high or low quality, popular or unpopular, or what have you. If her ten-year-old daughter wanted to read the dense and complex WATERSHIP DOWN? No problem. Her 12-year-old son didn't want to read anything but SPORTS ILLUSTRATED magazine? Fine, she kept a subscription going for him. The kids were coming home from libraries with 5 selections from the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series at a go? Fine. Her eight-year-old for some reason wanted a picture book more appropriate for a kindergartener? Whatever, no problem.
Even the mildly tasteless was okay; two modern book series that occasionally give parents fits are "Goosebumps", a series of kids' horror fiction, and "Captain Underpants," which frequently delves into potty humor. While I imagine she may have put the kibosh on my brother and I USING potty humor in mixed company, were "Captain Underpants" about when I was a child and had we taken an interest in it, I imagine Mom would have chalked it up to a need to blow off a little steam.
What my brother and I both learned with this approach was that with pleasure reading, just like any other activity one does for fun, we were free to do as WE chose. Reading was not a chore or an obligation, something we were being told to do or told HOW to do. We were calling the shots to a great extent; there was no such thing as a wrong choice when it came to reading. Literature became a playground in a sense. If either one of us tried to pick up something that truly was too dense for us to get into, we'd inevitably get bored after a couple paragraphs and put it down. She trusted that any period of literary "slumming" was just a phase of sorts. And she saw no problem with older school-age children picking up the occasional picture book for younger readers -- after all, occasionally she picked up a picture book herself.
Look at it like this. You want your child to be standing in front of you with a book in their hands and saying "Pleeeeeeease can I have this?" instead of a video game or the like. So if you actually GET that happening, why would you then turn that down because you don't like their choice of book?
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Epinions.com ID:
etain
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Location: New York, NY
Reviews written: 19
Trusted by: 1 member
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