Children
Surprise! Surprise! Children still love to read
For years we’ve been sold a bill of goods. Supposedly, we are a society of instant pleasure and instant return on investment. We want silly half-hour comedies and action movies with liberal doses of violence and sex. Video games have replaced board games; flash and the obvious replaces quality and reflection. When some people complain, the entertainment industry says they are only giving people what they want! It’s just so much baloney being served up. This is why I have particularly enjoyed a few recent phenomena. The success of some quality, even serious, movies. The return of the one hour drama on TV. Evidence that most individual investors buy-and-hold as the market seesaws. Children reading. Yes, children are reading.
The Harry Potter series has been incredibly popular with children. Some parents in various communities express concern with the emphasis on wizardry and magic, failing to recognize that this is primarily how young children see the world anyway. A magical, buzzing, whirling confusion of the unknown and the unexplained. It’s scary and exciting at the same time. We have increasingly tried to turn children into miniature adults by emphasizing facts and rational thinking earlier and earlier. We reduce free play and add more structure, to the point that many children can’t play sports without an adult there to organize it. Fantasy and play are seen as unproductive instead of the primary way that children explore and attempt to understand the world around them.
Children keep trying to tell us we are making mistakes at home and in school with our overemphasis on teaching facts and creating even more competitive environments at early ages. The message typically comes in the form of some silly toy or game that becomes incredibly popular. Parents usually can’t understand what is so appealing about the particular item but they dutifully run all over town to find what their child "desperately" wants. The message also comes from many children who get turned off to learning at an early age. Meanwhile we are fed constant statistics about how many hours children spend watching TV or playing video/computer games.
Now along comes Harry Potter. It taps the magical, mystical spirit that exists in every child. Children are reading these books as fast as they can get their hands on new editions. Many of these children had showed little interest in reading. This is not the first series of children’s books that have been wildly popular. But it comes during a time when we had been convinced that children had become so passive from watching TV that they no longer would use their imagination to create their own mental images from words. Wrong! It comes at a time when we had been convinced that children (especially boys) were only interested in visual, fast-action violence. Wrong!
Here’s a real kicker. The American version of the books eliminates the British colloquialisms. Publishers assumed children would either be confused or turned off by seeing unfamiliar words to describe familiar things. But we live in a fun new world. Children are going online, probably with parental help, and ordering the British versions of the newest releases and loving them. Another glaring example of adults failing to understand children. Kids make up their own language all the time. They love odd words and silly ways of saying things. The British words are a turn on, not a turn off.
What can we learn from this? Children have suffered from the loss of story telling as a core part of our social/family fabric. They love mystery and fantasy. Play is one of the main ways of learning about the world. They haven’t lost their ability or interest in reading. They even love old-fashioned board games. Children come into my office every week and seek out the same games I’ve had for thirty years and use them not only to have fun but also to connect to me and to play out their issues and concerns. Create the kind of text that appeals to children and they will choose to read. Create the kind of play that appeals to children and they will choose to play with you. Create the kinds of learning materials that appeal to children’s minds and they will love to learn. It’s not the children who have changed. It’s the adults who have lost their own sense of what it is to be a child.
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