Can books damage children?
No.
EVAN JOHNSON, STAFF
If you were lucky enough to meet me when I was a six-year-old, I probably sidled up to you, ruddy-cheeked and grubby-fingered, my mouth launching wayward spittle, and asked if you wanted to see my penis. (“No, not particularly,” my great-aunt used to say.) The point is, I had fairly bad judgment, and I certainly wouldn’t want the aesthetic compass of an entire category of literature to be calibrated by the combined whims of this six-year-old exhibitionist and his drooling peers. Yet people that know much more than I about children and literature continually stress that kids should be encouraged to read whatever they want. What gives?
“The important thing is not what they read, but that they read,” says Gregory Bryans, professor of children’s literature of U of M. Though it’s tempting to read statements like this as an example of the flailing desperation of an establishment utterly defeated by the competing allure of alternative media (television, video games, the Internet, Pog) it turns out that it’s actually a carefully considered principle, both benevolent and democratic, with an eye toward allowing children the freedom they need to develop a lifelong love of reading.
“If children have enough positive and enjoyable early experiences with reading material of their own choosing, it seems then far more likely that they might one day turn to the classics when they are ready to do so,” continues Bryans. If you’re at all skeptical about the “their own choosing” part, it might be because you snobbishly think you have better taste than children: they want to read a Mary-Kate and Ashley adventure (the one where Mary-Kate and Ashley investigate a hilarious but minor misunderstanding at Sea World); you want them to read Tolstoy (the one where Ivan Ilyich’s spiritual anguish helps him come to terms with suffering and the inevitability of death, at Sea World).
Some children’s books are just so artistically and dramatically worthless that a concerned critic might be tempted to burn them. Special mention in this category should go to the series of Survivor paperbacks for kids (a spinoff from the TV series) that tell the dull story of a fictional Survivor-like teen challenge. The books steal the Choose Your Own Adventure gimmick (already dubious to begin with) but remove the joyful rush to be had in making Important Choices, leaving only the grinding, unpleasant mechanics: you “choose,” at the end of certain segments, whether or not you want to bother reading the next few pages. “To read about the next challenge, continue to page 9. To skip it, go to page 13.” Every “choice” offered by the book loudly proclaims the narrative irrelevance of its constituent parts. Why bother reading it at all?
But be careful with your snobbery: it can be off-putting to children when fusty old bespectacled dustbin-librarians tell them what constitutes “worthwhile” literature. As a child, I came to associate the sight of a silvery award on a book’s cover with a ponderous, moralistic narrative, the type that, in the words of journalist Russell Smith “confirm in any young person’s mind the boredom and banality of all literary endeavour.”
On the other hand, perhaps your concern is moral rather than aesthetic, and you consider children to be too delicate to withstand the many nefarious ideological implications lurking deep beneath the placid surface of every picture book. And what about the books that are openly, aggressively didactic? Surely children, with their soft, malleable skulls, can be easily damaged or indoctrinated by a book like the ruthlessly conservative “Help! Mom! There are Liberals Under my Bed!” or the 1991 picture book LATAWNYA, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say “no” to Drugs (great title — so full of subtle charms!) “Daisy slapped the drugs and alcohol out of Latawnya’s hoof. Latawnya soon found out that smoking and drinking were not as good or as easy as they looked when Connie was smoking drugs and drinking,” reads one of this unintentionally surreal book’s typical passages. How’s a child to cope?
“I think we have problems if we conceptualize young people as that vulnerable that impressionable, that pliable,” says Mavis Reimer, Canada research chair in the culture of childhood at the University of Winnipeg. Reimer stresses that children need to be taught reading strategies, taught to ask the right questions: “how do you approach texts; how do you think about texts; can you resist texts?” If these questions are deployed at appropriate times by young readers, then the problem of a book’s “invisible” ideologies worming their way into a child’s mind tend to be mitigated.
Though I read frequently as a child, I’m not convinced at all that anything I read had any truly damaging effects on me. I did have some moments that felt touch-and-go at the time: only once in my otherwise mama’s-boy childhood did I ever feel maternally smothered, and that was while reading Robert Munsch’s hugely popular Love You Forever, the fourth-best-selling children’s paperback of all time. I’m not even sure my mother was in the room when I read it, but this irksomely sentimental and occasionally creepy book, full of illustrations that resemble cheese melted under the torrid glare of a mother’s undying love, made me really question my relationship with my parents. “Maybe mother and I should see other people,” I thought.
“The whole question of whether books damage children is a very weird one,” says Reimer. “I would put that question to an adult: do books damage you, as an adult?”
For the correct answer, see page 35.
