2002 Annual Meeting Presentation

The George Hull Centre Annual General Meeting
June 17, 2002

Guest Speaker: Susan Perren, Children’s Book Critic, The Globe & Mail

The Book and The Child

When your Executive Director - she who must be obeyed - called to ask me for the title of my talk - I gave her the first thing that came to mind - The Book and the Child. I have found that the first thing that came to mind was, in fact, exactly what I had in mind to say, except that I want the word ‘child’ in the title to read as child from infancy to adolescence.

Last week a story in that other national newspaper caught my eye. It was a report on the results of a new Statistics Canada study on how Canadians spend their time. Part of the page on which this report appeared was taken up by a chart which showed the number of minutes we spend per day on activities like housework, meal preparation, shopping, leisure, and childcare.

The startling finding - at least to me - was the average number of minutes spent watching TV each day - 82. This figure was particularly alarming as it relates to other data in the chart. Canadians spend on average 17 minutes a day playing with their children, 4 minutes a day teaching their children, and 4 minutes a day reading or talking to their children. Figures for low-income families are marginally higher, but counteracting that benefit is the greater amount of time spent by that grouping watching TV - 132 minutes a day.

The people whose business it is to be outraged by this news - and particularly the revelation about reading - were and, one presumes, still are outraged. These professionals say children should be read to for at least 30 minutes and up to an hour a day. Professor Andrew Biemiller from the University of Toronto’s Institute of Child Study, the author of Language and Reading Success, underscores that guideline and urges parents to read to their children on a daily basis until they are ten.

The article distills some of Biemiller’s thinking on this issue: “The most crucial thing while reading to young children”, says Biemiller, “is taking the time to explain the meanings of new words, and even reading stories and picture books up to four times in a row to reinforce the new vocabulary. If little children do not hear the sounds and learn the meanings of millions of new words before they begin school, they will be disadvantaged when it comes to learning to read.” A failure to build vocabulary at a young age has repercussions later on, Biemiller says: ” It (a limited vocabulary) may be OK for grades one and two because the reading kids do involves very low vocabulary loads, but by grade three and four we start expecting more normalized vocabulary words. The kids have just got to have them.”

Of added concern, he goes on to say, is the fact that by the age of three children from middle class and affluent homes have absorbed about three million words while their counterparts from low income homes have a vocabulary of just a million words. Another instance where, sadly, by the age of three the playing field ceases to be a level one. Professor Biemiller, an expert in this field makes a compelling case for an early and strong relationship between children and books..

There are though, other aspects of this relationship that have less to do with the acquisition of vocabulary and readiness for reading that I, an amateur, would like to explore with you.

As the Mother Goose Parent-Child program and, undoubtedly, many of you have observed, a book is more than a book when it comes to young children. A book and a small child also involves a lap - a parent’s, a grandparent’s, a caregiver’s lap. This triangle, or cocoon if you like, is a powerful one and one in which the book takes on added value. In this context it is more than a source of the delight derived from words and story; it is a form of connective tissue, and an agent of bonding and connection for all adult / child relationships. It is especially valuable in cases where that relationship is tenuous or at risk.

May I suggest, do I dare suggest in present company, that for the very young child a book can play the role of transitional object in the Winnicottian sense. Think of the book as beloved object, required to be read over and over; who of us has not wondered at this need for repetition of a favourite story, especially as a bridge to sleep. In this sense, the book could be construed as a defense against anxiety in its various guises. It also an object “other than self ” that can be sucked, bitten and mauled beyond recognition but is thrown away at the thrower’s peril.

In the slightly older child, books move beyond the pleasures of words and story and the rhythm of those words to become explicators of the world that surrounds the child with all its attendant complexity, mystery, joy and sorrow.

Unexpurgated fairy tales and folk tales can do beautifully in this role. They can serve, as Bettelheim says, in his classic, The Uses of Enchantment, as vehicles for “access to deeper meaning, and that which is meaningful tothe child at his stage in development.” “Fairy tales”, Bettelheim said, “stimulate the child’s imagination; help him to clarify his emotions; be attuned to his anxieties and aspirations … while at the same suggest a solution.” Think Hansel and Gretel; Think Jack and the Beanstalk.

Some of the most profound questions about life are addressed in books for young children. Think of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web and Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, both of which explore the concept of the cycle of life and death and the pros and cons of immortality in ways that are both highly sophisticated and utterly delightful.

Books also work for children as a refuge from difficulty. Francis Spufford, in his new and quite wonderful memoir, The Child that Books Built, attributes his addiction to books to a difficult childhood during which his parents were preoccupied with his dying younger sister. The external world became a fragile thing for Spufford, its fragility mirrored in his frail sister Bridget. He dove into the safety and succour of books with an alacrity bordering on the pathological. Less preoccupied parents might have been worried. As someone who spent his childhood “falling into a book at every possible opportunity”, Spufford can now write that “The books you read as a child brought you sights you hadn’t seen yourself, scents you hadn’t smelled, sounds you hadn’t heard. They introduced you to people you hadn’t met, and helped you to sample ways of being that would never have occurred to you. And the result was, if not an ‘intellectual and rational being’, then somebody who was enriched by the knowledge that their own particular life only occupied one little space in a much bigger world of possibilities.”

Books fight for space in all our lives, and no more so than in the lives of adolescents, that species of human being who in today’s world resides somewhere between the age of ten and adulthood. In this group, books compete with music, movies, videos and, of course, TV, pervasive, ubiquitous and instantly gratifying pursuits all. In school curricula, books fight for a place in a culture that places high value on numeracy and another form of literacy, that of computers. Nevertheless, you know and I know that there are important ways in which the book speaks to and for adolescents, and many reasons why we should advocate for its primacy in the curriculum and in adolescent lives in general . What follows are some thoughts and questions on the interaction of books and adolescents.

Would it be far-fetched to suggest that for the adolescent the physical act of reading has interesting resonances about it? Does it, can it, summon up remembrances of things past, of a prelapsarian world of, well … the lap - and the joined act of reading and listening which I suggested earlier goes beyond both? In so doing does it satisfy regressive yearnings? Can it make reparation for or act as a partial substitute for what was missing during an adolescent’s childhood? Inherent in the image of the lap is the notion of being held, of holding, and of being in the thrall of a character, an idea, or the sequence of events that constitute a story. Being in a book, inhabiting a book if you like, is to be nurtured. It is also a safe place to be, a kind of hammock of suspended disbelief where many things are possible; a place where alliances are formed with characters, similar or dissimilar to the reader, who may do things the reader has done or may be thinking of doing. These characters may also, for ‘good’ or ‘bad’, do things the reader had never thought or dared to do. ‘Living’ in the book the reader can exist without risk to self, save the risk inherent in imagining her or himself to be something other than what he or she is, or doing, something that she or he has never dared do before. Am I special? Or am I not special - in any way? Am I strange? Are there others like me? Are they the same or different in important or substantial ways? Are there others who live with the same fears, worries, kinds of families, siblings, friends or situations as I do? How do they live with them? These are questions that adolescents often ask themselves - usually not others. In the private world of the book, in the unthreatening dialogue that occurs between book and reader, answers may be suggested for these questions.

Paradoxically, the best writing for young adult readers (and for readers of any age) does not have as its organizing principle the provision of answers to questions existential or otherwise, that haunt adolescents. The best writing is not didactic, nor is it issue-ridden. It does not teach, and it does not preach. Rather, it allows the reader to reach her or his own conclusions about what has been written, to make of it what he or she can at that particular point in his or her life. Conclusions are arrived at through a kind of alchemy between reader and writer, a fusion of what each brings to the process that results in something greater than either one’s contribution. This kind of writing is respectful of the reader and does not insist on being heard. Honouring the reader in this way may be a distinct departure from the ways adolescents are treated or viewed by the adults in their lives.

To sum up, good literature has the capacity to touch a reader, child or adolescent, deeply and, in doing so, give the reader a sounding of her or his own depth. It can make a reader think and feel; it can provide comfort; it is companionate; it can encourage the development of empathy; it can provide vistas of worlds beyond any world she or he knows now. In short, it can be a transfiguring power.

In making a case for the part played by books in the intellectual and emotional development of child and adolescent, I am all too aware, as I stated earlier, of the competition that books face. Additionally, there are the demands of time that reading and reading to impose on busy parental lives. And books are expensive. But as Professor Biemiller knows and I believe, books and reading are every child’s birthright.

How can we assure that these essential ingredients are a part of each child’s life? I have a few suggestions:

• Beginning in infancy monitor TV use very carefully. I would say turn it off but that would be being didactic which is not a good idea.
• Support and lobby for the initiatives developed in provinces such as New Brunswick which gives a book to every newborn in the province.
• Get involved in the crisis in school libraries. Fight for funding to restore the role of school librarian and for book purchases for those libraries.
• Support bookstores whose children’s sections are staffed by people knowledgeable about children and children’s books. Complain loudly if they aren’t.
• Applaud the initiative of TD Canada Trust which gives a book to every grade one student in Canada - that’s 425, 000 books, a boon not just for fledgling readers, but for the Canadian authors, illustrators and publishers of those books.
• Last, but not least, read to your child or someone else’s child every day for as long as you possibly can.

Thank you.