LECTURE: HOW TO GET YOUR CHILD HOOKED ON BOOKS

If you have a child who is under 7, getting him or her hooked on books may seem like the hardest thing you’ve ever done. You’re probably jolly tired already from work and child-care, and if you’ve got them walking, talking, out of nappies and reciting the alphabet you probably feel you deserve a break. After all, isn’t getting a child to read their school’s job?

Well – no. Getting a child not just to read but to love reading really is up to you. Schools can’t do it. Schools can only give your child the basics, not the passion. Like many other kinds of passion, reading is a private thing, best conveyed to a small audience – the smaller the better. When you really love reading, you feel as if there is no barrier between your mind and the author’s – as if the book is talking directly to you, and you alone. Reading books in a class can’t convey that, but reading a book one-on-one with an adult is the way you can start to get that feeling. Your voice, your passion, your love is the bridge between your child’s mind and the printed page. They can’t make that jump without it. You need to lend them your strength and confidence, exactly as you do when you’re teaching them to swim or ride a bicycle.

Reading to a child is one of the most enjoyable things you can do together. I say this as a mother who has one child who was always a natural reader – my daughter – and one who has been extremely reluctant – my son, who has to be prised away from computer games called Roman Total War. I know what it’s like to beg, bully or bribe a child to read. In the end, only reading to a child yourself really helps. It doesn’t matter if you aren’t very confident yourself about reading aloud – a child is the most uncritical audience, and far prefers their parent to the most accomplished actor reading an audiobook. The moment your child can sit up in your lap, you can begin. Some parents feel most comfortable with board books, and these are good fun if you don’t mind them being chewed – just as pop-ups are great if you don’t mind them getting torn. But while it’s good to make a child interested in the shape of books, and feel excited by what pops out of them, books are not toys. They are something much more magical. They windows into the world of story. They are what helps us to be more human, and to accumulate that understanding much faster and deeper than we could manage in a lifetime without books.

We are hard-wired for what Stephen Pinker called the language instinct, and if you talk to babies, sing to them and play games with them, you’re stimulating this. I am very against pushing young children, but if you read to them you’re only encouraging what they are instinctively reaching towards. Give them words! There’s a good one from Doring Kindersley called My First 1000 words, with clear bright photographs divided according to topic which has been a huge hit with the many toddlers who pass through my house. A much more exciting version of this, though, is Lucy Micklethwaite’s A Child’s First Book of Art. Not only can you teach a toddler to identify animals, faces, furniture and so on, you’ll be introducing them to great works of art.

Assuming your child then has enough vocabulary to understand words like cat, run, mouse and rabbit, I recommend beginning with Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Miss Moppet, closely followed by Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny. It doesn’t matter that your child will never see animals in clothes. It doesn’t matter that some of the words are difficult. These books are perfect for small hands and small minds. They are fun and funny, they tell stories small children instantly find appealing, about hiding, being chased, getting lost and finding safety. All small books are good – look out for Red Fox mini classics, for instance. You should also be introducing your child to nursery rhymes with clear, exciting pictures. I think Ian Beck’s is one of the best, alongside The Oxford Book of Nursery Rhymes. Please do be aware of how important rhythm and repetition are to a child. Look out for books like The Gruffalo, Helen Craig’s This is the Bear series or Where’as My Teddy, all of which are written in rhyming couplets, or ones that have a strong sense of metre like We’re Going on a Bear-Hunt. Read your children poetry, and sing to them! Remember, they deserve the best even if they will in their innocence accept the worst.

I strongly recommend that you buy, not borrow, any book your child enjoys because you’ll be reading it to them over 100 times. They are one of the best investments you’ll ever make. Build up a library of about 50 – 100 picture books, and take about 20 of them on holiday with you. Read about five a day, and you’ll find they become your child’s favourite thing, feeding not only their vocabulary but their imagination and games. If you make a visit to a children’s bookshop a regular treat, you’re half-way to encouraging reading for pleasure. Get into the habit of reading them the blurbs on the back or inside the jacket, of trying out a few pages, before deciding to buy. You don’t have to buy them new – but children, like all of us, love newness. For them, the feeling that they are the first person to be encountering an author becomes an important part of discovering reading. Don’t deprive them of shiny new copies just because you loved your battered old Puffins.

Please, please, make pleasure your guiding principle. If you don’t enjoy reading to your child, they won’t, either. Never force a book you’ve loved on them, but do read each book to yourself first, so you can tantalise them with the story. You can read a book that is a year or two ahead of their understanding once you’re past the very simple stage, and this is crucial because you can stop every now and again and ask them if they understand what a particular word means, or give a quick summary of the part you’ve just read.

Try reading different kinds of book at different times of day. For instance, I read poetry and history to my son when he has his bath, which he loves, but he then gets a chapter of a story once he is in his pyjamas. Try different settings for different kinds of book. If they are obsessed by cars or dumper trucks, read those when you’re outside; read stories about travel and adventure when you’re going on holiday. We used to read a picture book called Bunny Cakes before baking a cake, for instance, and still read a selection of much loved winter and Christmas stories like The Snow Queen and Crispin the Pig Who Had It All before Christmas. Don’t get stuck one just one kind of book or story. It’s as bad as being stuck on just one kind of food.

What toddlers need most from books is the idea of total security. You can’t go wrong with Jill Murphy’s elephantine Large family, Judith Kerr’s Mog books, Linley Dodd’s Hairy Maclary series or Shirley Hughes’ Lucy and Tom books. But just a little way along the road is the beginning of something a bit more thrilling. Books like Jez Alborough’s Where’s My Teddy? and Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who came to Tea introduce children to the idea that what is big and strange may not necessarily be dangerous. David McKee’s Elmer books are bright and fun but other books by him like Two Monsters and Not Now Bernard make children and parents explore fearful things together, like suspicion or neglect. The best picture books, the ones that are works of art, often have an element of danger to them. Children need a lot of courage to go out of your arms, and books will help them do this.

Fear is in fact one of the things that can get your child hooked on books, because fear becomes modified into suspense, an essential ingredient of storytelling. You don’t need books to create fear – if a child finds a particular book frightening then please don’t ever, ever force them to look at it – but you do badly need them to help them feel they can survive it. Debbie Gilori’s A Lion at Bedtime, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, the Ahlbergs’ Funnybones and Jeanne Willis’s The Monster Bed are fantastic for children of 3+, and get re-read obsessively by a child who suffers from night terrors. But if monsters are too much then the Pugwash books about the cowardly pirate, the Babar books and Orlando the Marmalade Cat are immensely reassuring. Get a mixture. Don’t confuse a lot of words with cleverness. Some of the simplest books are the most profound. I found when I became a mother that I remembered every word and image of John Burningham’s books, though I’d forgotten them for thirty years. Great children’s books sink deep down into the quick of your mind.

There is a big gulf between reading to a child and with a child and getting them to read for pleasure on their own, of course. I strongly recommend you continue to read to your child long after they have become confident readers – until the end of primary school, or beyond if wanted. Don’t punish your child for learning to read by withdrawing that half-hour of one-on-one time together before bedtime. If you have more than one child, read a different book to each one, and provide jig-saw puzzles or drawing materials for the others while they await their turn.

I am appalled by the dullness of most reading primers, the dreary Biff and Chip and Fat Sam the Pig. Children need a certain number of reading miles under their belt, but leave that kind of book, and anything called a “reading tree” to schools. I learnt to read with Dr. Seuss, and think that you can do no better than to use The Cat in the Hat. Look out for Arnold Lobel’s Frog & Toad books, which are enjoyable and funny, as are the Little Bear series illustrated by Sendak, all published by I Can Read. Judith Kerr’s picture books are also excellent because they tell a story using a vocabulary of only 200 words. Take it in turns to read paragraphs, and move your finger under the words. Get them to say well-known phrases or pick out familiar words and repeated phrases, like the Owl Babies calling, “I want my Mummy”, and pretty soon they’ll be reading them. Don’t worry if in the beginning they aren’t reading but saying it off by heart, because the penny will drop that this shape makes that sound.

You can’t have enough collections of fairytales. They are the rich earth out of which all stories grow, and your child won’t be able to enjoy Harry Potter or the Narnia books without them. There is a particularly wonderful new book out illustrated by Jan Pienkowski called The Fairy Tales which consists of just four – Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Hansel & Gretel and Cinderella which no child of over 4 should be without, but other excellent ones are the individual stories retold by Philip Pullman and illustrated by Ian Beck.

But, once you’ve achieved that, you need to get them to make the leap into reading alone, for pleasure. However wonderful the intimacy of sharing a story is, the true test is getting your child to love reading alone. Here I must say that reading is a talent, like writing. When my daughter first learnt to love reading, she said that she stopped watching TV “because I have one in my head.” Now, I suspect, she has a complete cinema, complete with sound and music. A great reader is someone for whom a book can become a whole world they step into, like Meggie in Cornelia Funke’s Inkspell. It is no longer a passive enjoyment but a creative act, a dialogue with the author in which you and they are changed.

Yet to begin with, you have to get them hooked. I can offer you no better advice than to follow what Scherazadhe did in The Arabian Nights. Start a child off on a thrilling story, by reading the first chapter aloud, then stop at just the point when it is unbearable not to know what happens next. Ask them to guess what happens, give mysterious hints and you’ll find the book disappears into their bedroom for further reading. It won’t happen overnight, but bit by bit it will.. The two best authors for this kind of story are Joan Aiken and Philip Pullman. Find their shorter books, the ones close to fairy-tales like Aiken’s Fog Hounds or Pullman’s I Was A Rat, and you will be off. Later on, try things like Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon, Eva Ibbotson’s witch stories and Anthony Horowitz’s horror stories, always a particular hit with boys.

Next, look for short, slim chapter books that give a child a sense of achievement. Francesca Simon’s Don’t Cook Cinderella and her Horrid Henry series are great for this, as are Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Doolittle stories and Roald Dahl. Dahl is especially good because he includes songs. (If you read Dahl, or The Hobbit aloud, remember to sing these!) Don’t give up on books with a lot of illustration. A lot of children and some parents have the misguided idea that “proper” books are all text. I myself believe it’s no coincidence that the height of popularity for the novel coincided with a time when adult novels were illustrated. A good illustrator adds enormously to the enjoyment of literature. Try Edward Ardizzone’s Little Tim books; try the adventures of Tintin, or Marcia Williams’s cartoon versions of Homer and Shakespeare. However, at 5 you can also try much more ambitious novels like CS Lewis’s Narnia stories because these are great stories written in clear, unambiguous English and have the advantage of wonderful illustrations.

Good illustrations are hugely important. Children have a strong sense of beauty which can be encouraged, and are surprisingly flexible about what they consider interesting to look at. They enjoy weird typography and line drawings as much as photographic realism. One of the outstanding picture book illustrators is Eric Carle of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, who uses collage, as does John Burningham. Almost anything illustrated by Quentin Blake or Tony Ross is a hit, but look out for artists like Lauren Child, PJ Lynch, Angela Barrett, Emma Chichester-Clark and Helen Ward. An artist can add a whole dimension to a child’s capacity to imagine a story, and keep them reading when they stumble and feel stuck. The most crucial age for getting and child reading for pleasure is 6-8, and the best ones, like The Wind in the Willows, have wonderful illustrations. Some of my own children’s first favourites, like EH White’s Charlotte’s Web, Dorothy Edwards’s My Naughty Little Sister and Dodie Smith’s 101 Dalmatians, all have particularly good illustrators, but even quite clunky pictures like Hugh Lofting’s in the Doctor Doolittle books add to a child’s relish. The best reprints of classic tales like The Wizard of Oz and The Jungle Book are by Templar, partly because of their pictures.

When a child first falls in love with a book, it’s a magical moment. My own son, a reluctant reader even now, was completely captivated by Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, which he adored so much he made a kind of sling so that he could walk around reading. But to fall in love with one book is not the same as falling in love with reading – that is what you have to strive for. Right now, it’s easier than it has ever been thanks to a great new golden age of children’s literature. Wonderful new authors, writing splendid stories in excellent prose, from Michelle Paver of Wolf Brother to Lian Hearn’s Tales of the Otori, are waiting to be discovered by confident readers. I always know when a great new author has arrived because he, or my daughter, will squirrel it away to read in bed. All the books I review, incidentally, are tested out on at least one child; if not my own then a host of godchildren or friends’ children, and I take their views very seriously.

You need to talk about the story with your child, and ask them where they have got up to – which means reading the book first yourself! If they answer, as one nephew of mine did, Page 78 then the chances are they aren’t enjoying it. Don’t force them to read what they don’t enjoy- only adults are expected to tolerate boredom in books. A great children’s book captures a child’s attention from the first paragraph, and holds it like a vice. Too often, the kind of book your child will be reading in class at school will not be this kind of book, which makes it doubly important that you find them. If you need suggestions, look on my website.

Your growing library also needs a number of fact books. Get the best Atlas you can, and stick a map of the world on your walls; and please, do, get them Our Island Story as it’s probably the best history book for primary-school children ever written. History teaching is being crippled by the National Curriculum, and I find children need more help with this subject than any other. Our Island Story by HE Marshall, will give your child a whole skeleton of moving stories on which to hang more detailed knowledge of what happened when, and to whom. It helps even more if you can back up a subject like history with novels by writers like Geoffrey Trease, and with the myths and legends of each period or culture. Help them in art with Lucy Micklethwaite’s books, and with science books, get hold of John and Mary Gribben’s books like Inventing the Future and The Science of Harry Potter, which are beyond praise.

It is absolutely no use, of course, expecting your children to read for pleasure if you don’t do the same thing yourself. You can interest them in being more ambitious if you tell them versions of stories you’ve enjoyed. I told my children the story of the Odyssey when they were five; they got The Lord of the Rings, Great Expectations and Jane Eyre a couple of years later. Great stories are great stories, no matter what your age. Watch DVDs with them, and get them to tell you where the climax comes; see if they can spot the classic three-act structure most Hollywood films have; discuss whether you would have done the same thing as the hero in their situation.

Do judge books by their covers – your children will. Dragons, wolves, warriors, spaceships and wizards are all good things to look out for, especially if you have a boy. Even if you have a very girly daughter, please don’t just buy her books with rainbow fairies on the cover. They won’t stretch her imagination. They won’t feed her heart. They won’t even teach her a richer vocabulary. Some people think that it doesn’t matter what a child reads as long as he or she is reading, but I think this the counsel of despair. There are junk books just as there is junk food, and you need to be as wary of one as of the other. But at the same time, don’t deny them books or comics which they find fun. They need a mixed diet, and books that are subversive or feel a bit illicit, such as the Horrid Henry series or Darren Shan, are part of that. My 12-year-old daughter is now reading Madam Bovary, having steamed through Anna Karenina and Jane Austen – but she also loves The Princess Diaries and what she calls “pink books”. My son can tackle books like Kenneth Oppel’s Airborne, but still loves Tintin and the Beano. By ambitious for them, but also recognise they are usually exhausted by school. At all costs, don’t make reading part of homework!

Apart from unconditional love, a love of reading is the single most important thing you can give as a parent, not because of the educational advantages but because children who love reading are never bored. I believe it is the greatest gift you can possibly give to a child. They will know more, have more inner resources, more curiosity, more sympathy, more delight in being alive. This is what Virginia Woolf wrote in The Common Reader about the joy of books:

“When the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards – their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble – the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when He sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them. They have loved reading.”

An abridged version of this lecture is published in The Times, December 2005