A Family of Readers

by Roger Sutton

  As a parent of girls who have been known to dance around with their friends in Disney Princess gowns, lip-synching to Avril Lavigne, shaking their booties, and calling each other “sexy,” I particularly appreciate the section in Blank’s book where she tries to help kids come up with their own definition for that ubiquitous word. Instead of dismissing sexy as a grown-up term not applicable to children, the way I clumsily did once with my oldest daughter, she names different feelings — giggly, excited, happy, weird, warm, or “just different” — and asks “How does a sexy feeling feel to you?” Blank leads kids to the refreshing conclusion that “sexy” isn’t just about Hannah Montana (I suppose back then it would have been Christie Brinkley) in tight pants. Ideally, it’s about exuding confidence and having a healthy body image. In Blank’s words, “A sexy person is someone who . . . really likes herself or himself, and shows it.”

  Do young children really need the kind of explicit information Blank proffers? Well, as Harris points out in It’s NOT the Stork!’s section on male anatomy, “Baby boys even have erections before they are born, while they are growing inside their mothers’ bodies.” It’s hard to deny that we are all sexual beings from birth. Telling kids the nuts and bolts of where babies come from seems easy in comparison to helping them sort through the sexual feelings and moral and emotional issues that only grow more complex as they get older. Blank and Harris and Emberley don’t present sex as an isolated act but as an integral part of what it means to be a person. The more comfortable we make children early on with this mindset, the better equipped they will be to grapple with their sexuality in all its glory.

  In my family there are two moms and five kids. I’ve yet to find a children’s book that depicts a cast of characters that looks anything like our particular multiracial, foster-adoptive family constellation. I know there are lots of artistic, social, political, and market-driven reasons for this; for one thing, such a book would risk getting so bogged down in introducing everyone that it would be hard to come around to the story.

  I used to worry about this. When my oldest child (a biracial, biological son) was also my only child, I scoured libraries, bookstores, and book lists to try to make sure that his books would be not only windows into others’ experiences but mirrors of his own. Fat chance of finding such a mirror that went beyond a reflection of surface appearance and into a fully realized story. In the end, despite my best efforts to find books to celebrate his nontraditional familial reality, Rory didn’t much care that Heather had two mommies or that black is brown is tan; he was far more interested in the adventures of Captain Underpants and Sylvester and his magic pebble, thank you very much, and I couldn’t really blame him.

  I began to think that much of my fretting over building a multicultural, LGBT-inclusive children’s book collection was the product of visiting adult preoccupations on my child. I had the good intentions of wanting to provide a literary world that reflected the life experiences that we shared as a multiracial, two-mom family. But I realized that this was the world I’d built as an adult. My son was included in that world, but he also had a world of his own devising: informed by me and by his other mom, of course, but more and more uniquely his as he grew up and made his own friends, followed his own passions, tastes, and interests, and formulated his own visions for the world.

  Of course, following such a line of thinking is itself an argument for the creation of books that tell stories from different vantage points. A child raised by straight parents who will grow up to be gay would be well served by children’s books that depict families with two mommies or two daddies, right? After all, my son’s world, occupied as it was by the stuff of preschool, was also one in which he imagined the adult he would become. Once, while reading Homemade Love by bell hooks and Shane W. Evans, Rory said something to me along the lines of, “I like reading this book about a family with all brown people because maybe someday I will grow up and have a family like that, too.” Eureka! I exhaled alongside overburdened Heather and her mommies and the black and brown and tan family and realized that Rory had a point. Reading children’s books isn’t all about looking at the here-and-now; it’s also about thinking about up-ahead-and-later.

  But there are limits to this vision of aspirational children’s literature, based on a child’s perceptions of adult life. One day Rory announced that he was going to marry his friends Andy, Tim, and Rose. Never once did it cross my mind that I was raising a future bisexual polygamist. What I understood from this declaration was that four-year-old Rory really liked his friends Andy, Tim, and Rose. A preschooler doesn’t really get what marriage is, because it’s an adult institution. That’s why, when the prince-in-search-of-a-prince picture book King & King came out (as it were), I felt that this was a book aimed more at well-intentioned, anti-homophobic adults than at children.

  Nevertheless, I think there is space for children’s books that address what it is to grow up and what it is to be an adult, books that move beyond glorifying and romanticizing childhood with a nostalgic tone that smacks of a tragic loss of innocence; after all, one of the main tasks of childhood is to leave it. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that I believe the children are our future. It’s more complicated than that: I believe the children are their future, and yes, I guess I believe the children are our future, too. But I am leery of songs, children’s books, and platitudes that focus only on this last belief. It’s all just a little too “and a little child shall lead them” for me. I don’t much like burdening children, real or imaginary, with the expectation that through their perceived innocence and charming naiveté they will save the world as they inherit it. This is different from acknowledging, celebrating, and supporting the fact — in literature and in life — that growing up is not a tragedy but a birthright.

  And, just as importantly, I believe the children are our present, too, and their present. And that’s why I am still on the lookout for books that depict different kinds of families and different kinds of being in the world. Even if it’s a stretch to imagine that my particular family (Puerto-Rican-Caucasian-Jamaican-African- American-biracial-two-moms-with-five-kids-foster-adoptive-with-some-bio-ties) will ever see itself in print, I like to think that if there’s room for Heather and her mommies, there’s room for more of their friends, too.

  Mention the word bibliotherapy and children’s librarians and booksellers have similar tales to tell. The stories go something like this: a well-intentioned parent comes in and asks for a book about death. When questioned further, she explains that her child’s grandmother is dying and the child needs some books to help her understand what is happening. The librarian or bookseller suggests several picture books that deal, in one way or another, with death. Each time the woman is handed a book, the librarian or bookseller tells her a little about it. Each time, the woman rejects the choice. “No, The Tenth Good Thing About Barney won’t do. That’s about a dog dying. I told you it was a grandmother. No, Grandpa Abe won’t do either, because it’s about a grandfather. Oh, no, I know you said this next lovely book is about a grandmother, but the grandma in this book has cancer. My daughter’s grandmother is dying from congestive heart failure.” And so it goes. The parent is looking for something that exactly mirrors her own life.

  Teachers also, with the very best of intentions, search for books that will address the emotional lives of the children in their care. One student’s family is going through a divorce, so let’s gather some divorce stories to help him. Another child is experiencing the jealousy that often comes along with a new baby in the house, so let’s read her some of those new-baby picture books. There are excellent books on each of these subjects; why am I so reluctant to hand them over?

  The more I think about my aversion to this kind of bibliotherapy, the more I define my own approach to children and books as a kind of “advance” bibliotherapy. Rather than address what is happening in the present, I’m inclined to prepare children for the many kinds of emotional experiences they will have before they occ
ur. I would rather inoculate children than treat the symptoms of the emotional trauma. We give children vaccinations against measles. We can’t vaccinate against divorce, but we can give children some emotional knowledge to use when they, or their friends, do go through a divorce. I advocate that we read picture books about death and divorce and new babies when no one is dying, when a marriage is strong, before anyone is pregnant.

  When I was in sixth grade, the mother of one of my classmates died from cancer. Ours was a small school, so we all knew Jill’s mother. We knew what kind of cupcakes she was likely to pack in Jill’s lunch and what kind of car she drove on field trips. The death of a parent had been, up to that time, unthinkable to me. I remember that I worried about my own mother, but more than that, I remember knowing that Jill’s behavior might be affected by her mother’s death. I remember thinking that if Jill refused to take turns on the monkey bars or if she pushed her way to the head of the lunch line, she might be doing these things because she was sad. No adult ever told me this, but I had read scores of books about children without parents. I knew that the orphaned Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden was a terrible brat because she was miserable, not because she chose to be; I understood, on an emotional level, what it might be like to be motherless.

  Fast-forward many years. I now have two children and can observe and contribute to their own reading choices. I try to avoid direct bibliotherapy, although of course we read books for factual information when facts help to prepare for new experiences: Fred Rogers’s Going to the Dentist and Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s Starting School, for example. But I also make a point of reading books about the “hard” stuff long before my children might need their emotional information. We have read books about racism, books about adjusting to a new school and town, and books in which children are dealing with alcoholic parents.

  Sharing emotionally complex books before a difficult experience occurs may give children the ability to practice their own personal bibliotherapy. Several days after her pet rat died, my daughter, Anya, found Robie H. Harris’s Goodbye Mousie on a bookshelf and read it to herself again and again. When, at age four, she broke her arm, she searched the shelves for Lynne Rae Perkins’s The Broken Cat and kept it on her bedside table as a daily selection until her arm finished healing. In both these cases she already knew these stories and sought them out herself: Anya decided when she was ready to read about the death of a beloved pet; Anya decided that she needed to revisit a story of injury and healing. My only contribution was a full, varied home bookshelf and a willingness to read to her.

  As a parent and librarian, I continue to recommend that parents read all kinds of emotionally complex books to their children. Read Bridge to Terabithia aloud to your kids, even if it does make you cry. Consider it a kind of vaccination.

  KATHERINE PATERSON: I get in trouble because my stories aren’t propaganda. With propaganda, you think you have an answer and you try to impart it. In story, you’re searching: you’ve got a question and your story is your way of looking for an answer, not giving one. You can’t lay down answers for people in stories. Stories are always open for the reader to learn what he or she is able to learn or needs to learn or wants to learn. I think that’s one reason people like Jesus better than they like Saint Paul, because Jesus tells stories, and they’re open-ended. Wonderful stories, the parables. You get to the end of one and you think, “Well, then what happened?” And it’s left open for you.

  ROGER SUTTON: I got an e-mail recently from an outraged person who saw our review of an evangelical book that we had panned for its pedestrian prose and amateurish illustrations. This person thought that what children need are answers, and this book had answers, in spades. So she would probably not accept a book of yours — you’re saying that you, as the writer, are exploring right alongside the reader.

  KP: Of course I am.

  RS: When you write, are you seeking to answer a question, or are you still asking the question?

  KP: I’m still asking the question. Bridge to Terabithia is the classic example, I guess. I wrote Bridge because my son’s best friend was struck and killed by lightning, and I had cancer. I wrote it because everything was awful. How can you explain to your child why his best friend was struck by lightning? Well, you can’t. But if you write a story, you’ve got to shape it. You’ve got to have a beginning and a middle and an end, and, at the end, the beginning and the middle have to make sense. So maybe in the story you can make sense of something that doesn’t make sense in life. By the time I had finished with the book, it wasn’t that I knew why a little girl had been struck by lightning or why I had cancer, it was that it made sense below the level of rational explanation.

  RS: It’s interesting, too, because you clearly wanted to explain a tragedy to your son, but you were also facing questions about yourself — why did I get cancer? It’s not just about explaining something to your son, or to children in general.

  KP: I realized at a very early point that the book was for me and not for David. Your first thought is that you’re being altruistic and helpful and all that kind of stuff, but pretty soon you realize who you’re writing for! You’re not doing it for the kid. I mean, if you were doing it for somebody else, then it would be propaganda, right? Because you would think you had something to impart that this poor, ignorant person didn’t know. And that’s not the way you write a real story.

  RS: I think of your books as being much more family fiction than children’s fiction.

  KP: I would love for families to read a book like Bridge to Terabithia or The Great Gilly Hopkins or Flip-Flop Girl together. I found, with my own children, that the books we read together became a sort of vocabulary for us, a way of talking about things that were hard to talk about. Sometimes all you have to do is invoke the name of a character, and the other person knows how you feel. I’d love to feel that my books were read that way.

  Oh, you’re not out of the picture. You’re never out of the picture. But adolescence is the stage in which readers begin to most acutely require privacy in their book selection and reading. This is only partly because of sex.

  By the time they become teens, readers will be accustomed to making independent choices. It is the job of adults — parents, teachers, librarians — to make sure that a rich array of books is available for these readers to choose from.

  Choice is the operative word — we would no more recommend giving Forever . . ., Judy’s Blume’s pre-condom, pre-AIDS classic of first love and sex, to a teen reader than we would endorse keeping it from her. A huge part of the pleasure of reading is picking out books for yourself, especially books that speak to a place inside you that you’re currently keeping under wraps. The late Mike Printz (after whom the Michael L. Printz Award for Young Adult Literature was named) was a high-school librarian in Topeka, Kansas, and in his library he always kept a box of books that kids were free to take and return privately, with no need for checkout or a library card. They were books about sex and physical development, of course, but also on topics such as child abuse or alcoholism. Mike reasoned that the kids who most needed these books were also those who would be most afraid to be seen reading them. But even the healthiest, happiest teen needs to be able to be alone with a book, one that he has pursued, chosen, and read on his own.

  For a long time, young adult literature was narrowly conceived, first as “junior novels” about romance, careers, or sports, and then, in the late 1960s, concerned with social issues as exemplified in the lessons learned by a teen protagonist. Gangs (The Outsiders), drugs (Tuned Out), runaways (Go Ask Alice), mental illness (Lisa, Bright and Dark), child abuse (Don’t Hurt Laurie!), alcoholism (The Late Great Me), and incest (Abby, My Love) were all favorite topics. While these books were intended as a kind of bibliotherapy, allowing young teen readers an easy, nonthreatening entry into sensitive topics, they were more often read as adventure stories, providing bookish junior-high kids with vicarious thrills about life on the wild side. I’m a little old to have been an audie
nce for these books, but I remember the similar charge I got out of David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade, a 1963 memoir of Wilkerson’s ministry to hardened teens on the streets of New York. I completely ignored the book’s heavy Christian evangelical message to focus on the sordid but enthralling tales of gang fights and heroin addiction. But if I did not become “born again” as a result of reading this book, neither did I start mainlining “horse.” I stayed the dweeby little egghead I was. Critics of these books (and Go Ask Alice is still frequently banned in school libraries today) made the same mistake that proponents did: each assumed that such books would “do something” to (or for) young readers. Both positions assume that reading does something it does not. While a novel about, say, drug abuse, will give a reader information and points to consider, it won’t get him high. It also won’t scare him straight, either — books don’t work this way.

  You know this. When you read some morbid Swedish murder mystery or sex-soaked Jackie Collins romp, you know it’s a story, not a set of instructions. But our laudable and instinctive desire to protect our young (or, less charitably, our shortsighted and futile desire to control our young) leads us to believe that they read differently from us, that they are “impressionable.” We all are. If reading didn’t have an effect on us, we wouldn’t do it; the mistake is in thinking that the effect is as simple as how-to, for kids or for ourselves.