“Tell the Lady What You Like”

amily reading. The words immediately conjure up an idyllic vision of children clustered around a parent’s knee, entranced by the magic of the tale being read aloud to them. An overstuffed armchair, crowded bookshelves, and soft lamplight are all integral parts of the scene (for some reason family reading always seems to be done at night). A sense of well-being prevails. Parents and children are in perfect harmony, all’s right with the world — what could be bad?

But what if the reality of family reading isn’t quite so cozy? After twelve years of bookselling and a previous incarnation as a librarian, I have seen my share of families interacting with books and with one another. It isn’t always pretty. Pursuing the ideal of raising literate, well-informed, book-loving children is a noble goal, but it can give rise to great frustration on the parts of both parents and their offspring.

Over the past few years, organizations such as the American Booksellers Association, the Association of Booksellers for Children, and the American Library Association have been promoting the idea that literacy begins at home, with adults reading to children. Many school systems nationwide have adopted programs in which parents contract to read aloud with their children for an agreed-upon amount of time per day. The American Academy of Pediatrics encourages pediatricians to give children under the age of five a book every time they have a checkup. Parents are being bombarded with the message that schools alone can’t produce readers — it’s up to them to initiate the process when their children are very young, surrounding them with books and reading to them on a daily basis. Building a home library, no matter how modest, is a key element in the process.

This is all well-intentioned and inherently good. However, as booksellers and librarians can attest, it can also produce high anxiety and guilt in already-overburdened parents. What if they skip a day’s reading? Will Tammy’s test scores suffer? What if Jacob turns reading time into endless negotiation time (“Can we read four books instead of two? Will you read Make Way for Ducklings for the fifty-ninth time? Can I have one more chapter? Can we read this really really really long book?”)? What about dealing with Joseph, who can’t sit still, or heaven forbid, Andrea, who absolutely hates to read? Parents are often too tired to read, or too busy, or too stressed out. Family reading takes time and commitment, and good intentions can easily be derailed by the minutiae of everyday living.

Shopping for children’s books can add to a parent’s angst. Most parents come to us in absolute bewilderment. They know, or have heard from their friends, that reading to their child is important, but they haven’t a clue where to start. Their own childhood reading experiences are lost in the dim haze of memory. Being confronted by the dizzying array of children’s book choices now available can be overwhelming. Parents who spend their days performing surgery, running corporations, and discovering cures for cancer are completely at sea when it comes to choosing books for their own children.

With all this in mind, I’ve come up with a few guidelines that I hope will make the bookstore experience a positive one. There is a world of difference between choosing books in a library and making choices in a bookstore. Introducing the element of commerce does strange things to otherwise sane parents. In libraries, parents tend to allow their children much more flexibility and latitude in book choices — after all, mistakes cost nothing and can be returned. When a book is going to be purchased, however, the transaction takes on much greater significance, and the issue of the relative “value” of the book being purchased often becomes more important than whether or not it will be read and enjoyed by the child for whom it was selected. A few simple steps can increase the chances of a successful matching of child with book.

TAKE YOUR TIME. If I had only one piece of advice to give, this would be it. Time spent choosing books is as important as time spent reading. A rushed experience is never a happy one. Set aside time for a bookstore visit. It’s worth traveling further to a good children’s bookstore or an independent general bookstore with a strong children’s section. There you can expect to receive competent, knowledgeable help.
It’s not always possible to shop without children in tow, but if you can manage on occasion to visit a bookstore without your very small children you’ll be able to maximize your time there, and perhaps even enjoy it. If you are accompanied by children, make them a part of the shopping experience. Older children should be allowed time to browse for themselves. Make it clear to them in advance whether they will be allowed to buy something, and tell them about price and quantity restrictions. If limits are set ahead of time, confrontations at the counter can be avoided. Try out books on younger children. You are making a financial outlay. To avoid disappointment, it’s a good idea to see whether or not your child responds to the title you’ve selected. Keep in mind that if it strikes a responsive chord, you’ll have to read it again . . . and again . . . and again . . .

TRUST YOURSELF. You know more than you think you do. Unless the bookstore staff knows you and your family extremely well, you are the one who holds the key to what your children will enjoy. Be as specific as possible when asking for help. A vague “Oh, she likes everything” doesn’t help the bookseller to narrow down the choices.

There are several misconceptions that booksellers deal with over and over again. One is that there is a magical “right” time to begin reading to a child. Another (which seems dear to many fathers for some reason) is that there is some canon of children’s literature, a sort of “Great Books” collection that can be purchased to guarantee that their child will get ahead of every other two-year-old and continue to succeed all the way to Harvard. A third is that there is a correct way to read to children, some Holy Grail of tone and expression that will ensure that every reading experience is a memorable one.

These beliefs are all untrue. It’s never too early to read to a child, but it’s never too late, either. Lost time can be made up; it’s not worth agonizing over the fact that William wasn’t read to until he was fifteen months old. What’s important is to start now. While certain books have attained “classic” status, no group of titles will satisfy every child’s needs. Books that appeal to one child will leave another child squirming. And the important thing about reading is not how it’s done, but the fact that it is done. Making the parent/child reading connection is much more critical than developing dramatic reading skills.
Choose books that you enjoy yourself. If you hate a book, your dislike is going to communicate itself to your child, and the whole experience of reading will be reduced to a chore rather than a pleasure.

LISTEN TO YOUR CHILD. Recently, I was helping the mother of an active four-year-old choose some new books for her son. He obviously loved being read to, and they already owned quite a few books. I showed her a number of my favorite books for four-year-olds, which she received with a marked lack of enthusiasm. I finally asked if there was something wrong, and she said, “Don’t you have anything shorter? I know he’s ready for longer stories, but I don’t have the time to read them.”

If she doesn’t make the time, she’s well on her way to losing her son’s enthusiasm for books. If he’s bored by books that are too young for him, he’s going to lose interest in books altogether. Your children will let you know what they’re ready for as they get older. Too often we see parents overriding their children’s tastes and interests, and I know that the books purchased with the best intentions in the world will remain unread and unloved.

Many parents of school-age children get sidetracked by the issue of a book’s reading level. Time and time again we hear parents ask for books on a “sixth-grade level,” only to find out after judicious questioning that the child they’re buying for is in third grade. When we suggest books that are more age-appropriate, we’re met with the protest, “But his teacher says he’s reading at the sixth-grade level.”

Reading level is only a part of the equation. The publishing practice of printing grade levels on paperback books is a bookselling curse rather than a blessing. I find few things sadder than seeing a child deprived of the opportunity to read a truly exceptional book because the reading level doesn’t fit her parent’s expectation. I’ve had to stand by while a fourth-grade dinosaur-lover wasn’t allowed to choose The Enormous Egg because the reading level was listed as 5.8, and he was allegedly reading at an eighth-grade level. I’ve watched children longingly finger the Boxcar Children mysteries while their mothers tell me that the Chronicles of Narnia aren’t quite challenging enough for them.

The word precocious is bandied about with disturbing regularity. Perhaps a child is precocious, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t need to read and enjoy the same books his classmates are enjoying. If everyone else in the fifth grade is racing through the Redwall series, it’s a real disservice to any child to have those books withheld because they don’t appear to be sophisticated enough or don’t have an award medallion on the front cover. Children need certain books at certain times, and if you listen attentively, they’ll let you know what they are.

STEP BACK. Knowing when to make yourself scarce is crucial with adolescents. As children get older, parents find that their control over reading material is slipping away. Once children learn to read it becomes almost impossible for any parent, no matter how committed, to read everything that her child reads. This is not necessarily a bad thing. For adults, nothing is more personal than our choice of reading material. The same holds true for adolescents. Reading at this age should be intensely private.

Far too often booksellers find ourselves dealing with the combination of an over-involved parent and an extremely sullen child. “Tell the lady what you like” produces absolutely zero response from Caroline, who would rather die than tell a complete stranger what she likes with her mother listening in. The situation usually degenerates rapidly, with the mother jumping in to tell us what she thinks Caroline likes, and Caroline refusing to even touch the books we offer.

This is the point at which an understanding parent should retreat and let the bookstore staff deal one-on-one with the child. We don’t need to be told, in Caroline’s presence, that she hates to read, that she doesn’t like sad stories, that her best friend moved away last summer. Any competent bookseller can find out all those things in just a few minutes alone with Caroline. And possibly the best thing of all is to just let her have time to browse by herself for a while; almost every child can find something to read if left to her own devices.

Parents who would be horrified at the thought of publicly humiliating their child can unfortunately do it inadvertently in a bookstore setting. I would say unequivocally that shopping for sex education books should never be done in your child’s company. No matter how comfortable and open your relationship is, to a child it’s never open enough to include bookstore staff and other nearby customers. This also applies to children with any sort of problem, from nearsightedness to learning disabilities, being forced to be a party to a discussion about what books might help with that problem. One of my worst moments as a bookseller came when I was approached by a mother accompanied by a very large, very unhappy-looking teenager. The mother asked, “Do you have any novels about an adopted girl who is overweight and has diabetes?”

RELAX. The fate of the civilized world doesn’t depend on whether or not you always make the right book-buying decisions. Shopping for children’s books can actually be fun, and book ownership can be immensely rewarding for your children. Don’t insist that every book be of great literary merit. You certainly don’t have to buy junk (and good booksellers hope that their stock doesn’t fall into that category), but children need to be exposed to a wide range of material in order to develop their own taste in literature. Many children go through a phase in which they read one type of book to the exclusion of all others. These are most often series books of some sort, but there are children who fixate on fantasy books, or animal stories, or Tintin titles. These phases cause great parental concern, but they generally pass. A savvy parent can even use them to teach negotiating skills (“okay, you can have one Goosebumps book if you choose another book from the biography section”) or math skills (“this Baby-Sitters Club book has to come out of your allowance. If it costs $3.50, plus tax, and you spent $1.25 on candy yesterday, how much do you have left?”). Most crazes have more to do with peer pressure than anything else. I asked a girl who religiously buys each Goosebumps title as it comes out whether she thought the latest titles were as good as the early ones. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t read them anymore — I just get them for my shelf.”

Try not to be too overprotective of your children’s reading. It’s legitimate to want to know whether a book contains anything that might upset your child (“does the dog die?”), but children are amazingly resilient. While books might deal with difficult situations, they can help children to make sense of the world around them. To reject a book because a character’s parents are divorced or a beloved grandfather dies robs a child of the opportunity to imagine what she would do in that situation, and to see how someone else handles it.
Most of all, enjoy the stages of your child’s reading, from the hands-on board book phase to the hands-off adolescent novel phase. Don’t stop reading aloud together when your children have learned to read for themselves. There are too many books that beg to be shared. And don’t worry about strict adherence to daily reading schedules — just provide an atmosphere where reading is encouraged and valued. With a little imagination and a lot of hard work, you can ensure that your children, too, will look back on their family reading experiences through an idyllic, lamplit glow.

Terri Schmitz is the owner of The Children’s Book Shop in Brookline, Massachusetts.