A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  ROGER SUTTON: You’ve built a second career on getting boys to read. Why don’t they? What are you trying to fix?

  JON SCIESZKA: I’m trying to fix that boys never give reading a chance. They’re so impulsive and so into instant gratification, or else they turn off reading because of an experience like having to read a particular book for school. Which is what happened to my son in third grade: Little House on the Prairie was the one required summer-reading book. To his credit, he read the whole thing, but he just kept saying, “Nothing’s happening!” Finally he decided, “All right, that’s reading, then. That’s not for me. I’ll play hockey instead.” It killed me to see him give up on reading before he had the chance to find something he really liked.

  Of course, not everybody has to read really well, because I think we also tyrannize kids that way and say everybody has to love reading; reading is magic. And it’s not magic for those guys — and many girls as well — it’s really hard work. I think we come across to kids as too heavy-handed, saying that reading is wonderful, and if you don’t find it so, you’re a bad person.

  RS: Or even if we do say reading is fun, we sometimes give them books that we think are fun but kids don’t.

  JS: Yeah. I think a lot of boys get the impression that reading equals school. And they see school as a bunch of adults telling them what to do. Reading gets tangled up in that, like a bad taste for them. It’s interesting: in a lot of studies, boys will say they’re not readers, but when the studies (like those reported in “Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys” by Smith and Wilhelm) actually tracked what boys did read, they read a ton of stuff! Nonfiction, magazines, newspapers, computer manuals. Those are the storytelling styles that boys prefer — humor or nonfiction or comic books or graphic novels. Those are all different literacies, but they’re never counted as reading. And audiobooks should count, too. Our definition of “real reading” is way too narrow.

  MORE GREAT BOY BOOKS

  P. B. Kerr, One Small Step

  309 pp. Grades 5–7. NASA asks thirteen-year-old Scott, son of an air force flight instructor, to man a pre-Apollo 11, top-secret spaceflight to the moon with a crew of chimponauts. Kerr makes the wouldn’t-it-be-cool-to-be-an-astronaut dream a reality here, with a story that’s entirely plausible yet thoroughly imaginative.

  Jeff Kinney, Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules

  217 pp. Grades 4–6. Greg might not be the most reliable narrator, but in his characteristic hand-printed diary format with line drawings on every page, he reports life as a middle brother with humor and just the right accent of whiny pessimism.

  Ann M. Martin, Everything for a Dog

  211 pp. Grades 4–7. The stories of two boys (Charlie, who finds solace in his dog after his older brother dies in an accident, and Henry, who longs for a dog but can’t have one) and a stray dog named Bone begin separately but intersect in a moving conclusion. Far from an ordinary dog story, this is a fine book about life, death, forgiveness, and love.

  Rosanne Parry, Heart of a Shepherd

  163 pp. Grades 4–6. Set in the cattle-and-sheep country of eastern Oregon, this first novel chronicles sixth-grader Brother’s year of hard work (lambing, calving), danger (a rattlesnake, a fire), and worry about his father’s safety as a soldier on duty in Iraq. Brother’s honest voice conveys an emotional terrain as thoughtfully developed as the western landscape Parry evokes.

  Gary Paulsen, Lawn Boy

  88 pp. Grades 5–7. When the twelve-year-old narrator’s grandmother gives him a lawn mower, he decides he might as well earn a few bucks. Before he knows it, he’s an entrepreneur. With all the energy of a bull market, this is a brief, accessible farce, with summer escapism written all over it.

  Pam Muñoz Ryan, illustrations by Peter Sís, The Dreamer

  374 pp. Grades 3–6. Although terrified by his autocratic father, Neftalí Reyes grows up with a voracious love of words, books, nature, and ideas. Sís’s imaginative illustrations and the Chilean-rainforest-green type are striking complements to Ryan’s perceptive fictional account of poet Pablo Neruda’s early life.

  Roland Smith, Peak

  246 pp. Grades 5–8. Fourteen-year-old Peak is a natural-born climber. Smith takes classic plot elements — kid in trouble, physical challenge, overly ambitious parent — and plays them perfectly. The gripping story pulls no punches about the toll Everest exacts on body and psyche.

  Gary Soto, Mercy on These Teenage Chimps

  147 pp. Grades 5–8. Ronnie and his best friend, Joey, (both thirteen) are changing, with long gangly arms and awkward chimplike behavior. A rollicking novel about the painful beginnings of adolescence.

  Elissa Brent Weissman, The Trouble with Mark Hopper

  229 pp. Grades 4–7. Sixth-grader Mark Geoffrey Hopper deserves his reputation for being a mean-spirited, superior smarty-pants; shy, nice fellow sixth-grader Mark Geoffrey Hopper has just moved to town. When the two Marks are thrown together for a project, they begin to learn skills from each other and become tentative friends. Realistic school interactions and believable characters give this novel both kid appeal and substance.

  Tim Wynne-Jones, Rex Zero and the End of the World

  186 pp. Grades 5–7. At the height of the Cold War, Rex’s family moves to Ottawa, where he joins a neighborhood gang tracking down an escaped panther. Wynne-Jones sets the enormity of the possibility of world destruction against the equally cataclysmic concerns of childhood, all magnified by Rex’s vivid imagination. Sequels: Rex Zero, King of Nothing; Rex Zero, the Great Pretender.

  I was in junior high school when “the American tribal-love rock musical” Hair was huge with kids, that generation’s Rent. Few of us were actually allowed to see it (the show famously featured nudity, and it was briefly banned in Boston for that and for the onstage desecration of an American flag), but we had the record and knew all the songs. We also knew enough not to play it within earshot of our parents, but one afternoon when I thought I was safe, my mother overheard a lyric containing the word motherfucker and hollered. I also had a paperback that had been made from the show’s script, which, upon discovery, my mother literally — and ceremoniously — put in the trash.

  My parents were not generally censorious people, but something about Hair set my mother off. And something about the way I deeply resented her actions still exhibits itself in me forty years later: when there’s a question of parental prerogative versus a child’s reading interests, I’m with the kid.

  Hair seems tame now, as usually happens with objects of censorship viewed in hindsight, and parents today have by and large been diverted by hotter (in several senses) mediums to leave their children’s reading in peace. But the impulse to control such material remains, maybe not in you, but in parents of a less enlightened sort. Unless there is something that shocks/horrifies/angers you in your kids’ book choices, (a) they are hiding something from you, or (b) they aren’t reading enough.

  Part of what reading is all about is the way it allows us to independently define ourselves. Children should be reading books that contradict their parents’ declared interest: it’s a way to test those interests, to see if they work or how they might work better. And even when a parent honestly embraces a child’s right to read freely, there still will be times when your child needs to read secretly a book you don’t know about. Don’t make them talk.

  Censorship is just one controversial topic that has attended children’s reading throughout time. Others include perennial questions about didacticism (Does a book “send the right message”? ); bibliotherapeutic usefulness (Does reading a book about death help a grieving child? What do we mean by “help”?); the changing notions of what constitutes a family; and, most persistently, sex. The following essays try to provide some answers.

  Growing up Catholic, I was always afraid of something: unconfessed sins; demonic possession; Sister Alice, my grade-school principal, who once clamped her talons on my shoulder and marched me to her office for having a boy’s name Magic-Markered across my pal
m while receiving Holy Communion. But the one thing that gave me recurring nightmares was the idea that just praying to have a baby could get me knocked up.

  One Sunday, maybe riffing on the Old Testament plight of Abraham and Sarah, our pastor’s sermon involved the story of two parishioners, a husband and wife, who had been trying for years to have a child. This was in the 1970s, pre–Louise Brown, and apparently the only infertility treatment readily available to the couple was prayer. They prayed together; our pastor prayed with them; and, lo and behold, these prayers were answered: a week earlier, our pastor had baptized the couple’s one-month-old daughter.

  The adults in the congregation applauded this happy ending, while my seven-year-old mind began spinning faster than Linda Blair’s head in The Exorcist. Of course I wasn’t planning on praying for a baby, but what if I did so accidentally? What if I asked God for a hamster or black Converse high-tops but somehow worded my request unclearly and wound up pregnant instead?

  According to psychologist Anne C. Bernstein’s book Flight of the Stork, in which the author analyzes a series of interviews she conducted with children in the 1970s to see what they knew about human reproduction, there were lots of other confused kids out there besides me. There was the young boy Bernstein interviewed who, presumably having been told the sperm-and-egg story by his parents, figured that, since he came from an egg, he must be a chicken. There was the preschool-age girl who stopped eating because she believed she had “a baby in her tummy,” just like her pregnant mother did, and she feared that “were she to eat, all that yucky food would bury her wonderful baby.” Not every child with creative ideas about their origins develops such fears, but Bernstein’s research led her to the logical conclusion that providing children with straightforward, accurate information about sex and reproduction lessened their anxiety.

  It’s a mission that sex education books for children ideally should be able to help parents fulfill, because, let’s face it, parents need the help. I certainly don’t want my two daughters to be on constant red alert for virgin birth. Yet when my seven-year-old plunked down next to me while I was folding laundry and asked me how I knew I wasn’t ever going to have another baby, I started stammering, momentarily terrified by the realization that I couldn’t very well explain birth control without also explaining what needed to be controlled.

  Even with the best of intentions, writes Bernstein, “Many parents still find it difficult to talk about reproduction with their children. Their own emotional discomfort in talking about sex is one stumbling block, and their lack of information about what the child is really asking and is likely to understand is another.” Reading a good sex education book with my daughter gives me a script to consult when I get flustered. It’s not as if I need someone to feed me all my lines, but I also don’t want to just stumble onto the stage to improvise and, in my stage fright, risk conveying a message I didn’t mean to convey.

  It’s too bad Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley’s It’s NOT the Stork!: A Book about Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends wasn’t around for the parents of the little girl with the baby-in-the-tummy belief — a still-common explanation for pregnancy, one I’ve unthinkingly used myself. Bernstein’s interviewee would have been quickly set straight by their “Pregnant Woman at the Movies” page. Here Emberley’s welcoming cartoon art depicts a mother-to-be in her theater seat, chomping on snacks, while an interior view of her torso clearly shows the distinction between “popcorn in the stomach” and “fetus in the uterus.”

  Since the 1994 publication of It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health for adolescents, Harris and Emberley have established themselves as the go-to duo for thorough, accessible books on human sexuality for children, and their audiences just keep getting younger. Next in the series is It’s So Amazing!: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families, which speaks to readers ages seven and up, while Stork! is designed for kids as young as four.

  A 2005 New York Times article by Jodi Kantor titled “Sex Ed for the Stroller Set” articulates the sensible rationale behind the growing trend toward early sex education: “According to this approach, toddlers should learn words like ‘vulva’ at the same time they learn ‘ears’ and ‘toes,’ benign-sounding myths about storks and seeds constitute harmful misinformation, and any child who can ask about how he or she was created is old enough for a truthful answer.” Thus, Harris and Emberley label the anus as well as the elbow on their side-by-side drawings of a boy and girl at bath time, and relate anatomical details that even adults might find enlightening, such as the distinction between the vagina (interior) and the opening to the vagina (exterior), and the illustration depicting a circumcised versus an uncircumcised penis.

  But naming body parts is one thing; talking about what they can be used for is another. Even parents comfortable doing the former activity with their preschooler might still have to steady themselves when they reach chapter ten of It’s NOT the Stork! and see Emberley’s illustration of a blissful couple lying together in bed — woman on top — hearts floating in the air above them, a blanket covering their naked midsections. Although Harris includes a disclaimer for readers about how “children are much too young to do the special kind of loving — called ‘sex’ — that grownups do,” she does directly address the mechanics of baby making, i.e., “this kind of loving happens when the woman and the man get so close to each other that the man’s penis goes inside the woman’s vagina.”

  Her definition almost makes intercourse sound accidental — “Whoops, got too close to each other again!” — but at least children aren’t left to concoct their own possibly unsettling renditions of exactly how the egg and the sperm meet. They’ll know sperm doesn’t travel via hand-to-hand contact, like cold germs, or squiggle across the swings at the park.

  Harris’s emphasis on sex as an adult activity could also be construed as reassurance. Children tend to view sexual intercourse as “silly” or “gross,” so most will probably be relieved to hear they don’t have to engage in such shenanigans anytime soon. When I was a teenager, I babysat for a ten-year-old girl who told me she planned to adopt babies instead of giving birth to them herself, not because she wanted to avoid the pain of labor, but because she was never, ever going to do “that,” at which point she frowned and shuddered, as if she were talking about enduring multiple root canals.

  Or is Harris’s adults-only directive really there to reassure parents, who might assume that the humorously entwined couple in Emberley’s cartoon will prompt five-year-olds to leap into bed together? Sex educator Deborah M. Roffman, in her book Sex and Sensibility: The Thinking Parent’s Guide to Talking Sense About Sex, bemoans the “two uniquely American myths” that hamper our society’s ability to openly discuss sex with children. “The first is that although knowledge is a good thing, sexual knowledge might not be (the old ‘tell them about it and they’ll go right out and do it’ bugaboo). The second is that giving information . . . is the same thing as giving permission.” Having worked with children for many years and having observed the more forthright approach to sex education prevalent in most other developed countries, Roffman has concluded that “talking openly about sex tacitly gives a child permission, all right, but only to do just that: to talk and to think, to reason, to understand, to clarify, to ask questions, and to come back later and talk some more. And to see us as credible and trusted sources of information.”

  And here’s my question: even if books like Stork! do heighten children’s curiosity about their bodies, is this really such a bad thing? I suspect that Harris and Emberley would say no, but have their voices been tempered by today’s socially conservative culture? In journalist Judith Levine’s book Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children from Sex, a sex educator is quoted as saying that twenty-first-century America has mainstream sex education and right-wing sex education but no left-wing sex education. Sure, sex education books no longer admonish children that they will develo
p epilepsy or start wetting the bed if they “self-abuse,” the way Victorian-era treatises did. Still, what’s published today, even Harris and Emberley’s body-positive, celebratory fare, stops short of letting kids in on the whole truth: one of the best things about human sexuality, in addition to generating the miracle of birth, is that it gives people pleasure.

  Ironically, for a truly progressive approach to sex education for children, I had to look to the past. I was combing through the juvenile birds-and-bees section at my local library one day when I happened upon several copies of a small, battered paperback called A Kid’s First Book About Sex. Written more than two decades ago by Joani Blank (founder of the revolutionary San Francisco female-friendly sex-toy store Good Vibrations), it made Stork! seem almost puritanical by comparison.

  A Kid’s First Book About Sex sounds like it belongs on the board-book shelf — colors, shapes, numbers, and . . . sex! — and in fact it proclaims right off the bat that it is aimed at “girls and boys whose bodies haven’t started to change into grown-ups’ bodies.” Then it goes on to freely admit that, unlike most sex ed books for the younger set, it won’t “say much about how babies are made and born” because “making babies is an important part of sex, but there are lots of other things kids want to know about sex!”

  Like what things? How about how an orgasm feels? Blank, with accompanying black-and-white cartoons by Marsha Quackenbush, compares it to, among other satisfying sensations, “climbing up the ladder of a big slide and whooshing down” and “sneezing after your nose has been tickling.” And she encourages dialogue, asking readers questions (“Isn’t [masturbation] a big word for something almost everyone does? Did you ever hear any other words for masturbation?”) and humorously indicating the different reactions such questions might provoke in parents. (“If you ask your mom or dad a question about sex, how will they look? This one is pleased or happy. This one is scared. This one is embarrassed. . . . This one is running away.”)