Every Child to His Taste
by and
IT IS difficult, these days, to make any kind of flat statement without danger of starting a riot, but we believe that we are reasonably safe in saying that, by and large, books for children are a good thing. They entertain and/or instruct, they make the rainy day a pleasure, many a twoyear-old has been lured away from the Ming vase by The Nosy Little Rabbit, and most important of all, the child who has enjoyed books from babyhood is the one who will grow up to get the real good out of War and Peace or The Magic Mountain.
The question of what is suitable or unsuitable in juvenile literature, however, is filled with dynamite. Some people feel that a book which doesn’t impart a certain amount of specific information — directions for weaving an Oriental rug, for example, or a reliable recipe for tortillas—is an absolute waste of time. Others look askance at any story which doesn’t point a sharp moral lesson. Furthermore, the subject is haunted by the specter of the comic books, and by grisly accounts of children who have strung up their little playmates, or stuck one another with fountain pens, just because there are similar goingson in the funny papers.
We find it very difficult to get worked up on any of these points. It can do a child no harm to learn how to make tortillas, or to be reminded to obey his parents, but these concerns, however worthy, should not be the primary ones in selecting a child’s book. The function of any juvenile is to entertain and interest its reader, so that he will come to feel at home in the world of literature and make it his own.
It seems unlikely to us that a child in whom this interest has been established can be harmed by reading comic books. All the children in our neighborhood read them as they please, with no signs of moral decay. By the time a child is six or seven and is reading the comics for himself, his parents should have had time to give him enough sense of reality — not to mention human feeling — to prevent his acting like Heels Beales. If he engages in any of the antisocial performances so often blamed on the comics, his parents would do better to consult a psychiatrist instead of writing letters to the editor denouncing Dick Tracy. Merely withholding the techniques of violence from a mentally unhealthy child is not going to turn him into a pillar of the community.
This does not mean, however, that comic books are particularly beneficial, or even completely harmless. They are a serious trap for the child who has trouble in learning to read, for they meet him more than halfway. He can sit back and relax while the pictures and semi-literate text convey an exciting story. He will not be spurred into an effort to read something else because, as far as he knows or cares, he holds literature in the hollow of his hand — with plenty more where that came from. Naturally, he sits through his reading classes in an indifferent trance, waiting to get back to Smilin’ Jack.
This is a thoroughly unwholesome state of affairs, and we have every sympathy with the parent who is trying to remedy it. We would have even more sympathy if we could avoid feeling that, to some extent at least, the parent is to blame. Learning to read does not begin in the first grade, or in school at all. It begins when a child is two, or thereabouts, and its mother starts reading aloud. All tiny children love to be read to, and the importance of the gay, brightly colored juveniles written for the very young cannot be overestimated. It is during the pre-school years that a child gets his reading attitude established, and we doubt that teaching him the ABC’s at an early age will do him half as much good as reading to him, consistently and at length, exciting stories — all about a little squirrel who outwits a fox, or the hopes and fears of a conversational fire engine.
We do not underestimate the drudgery involved in this suggestion. We ourselves have droned endlessly through these and other stories, and there have been moments when we felt that our tongue would wither if there had to be one more repetition of Crybaby Calf, or The White Bunny and His Magic Nose. Nevertheless, this sort of spadework pays enormous dividends. It establishes in the child a belief that books are devised for his pleasure — an invaluable attitude for beginning the hand-to-hand tussle with the written word.
For an older child who indicates that he intends to go through life never reading anything unless the characters have balloons coming out of their mouths we suggest a regime of exposure, on every possible occasion, to books whose sole purpose is to amuse. But make sure the books will really interest the child.
It is easy enough to choose a book for a baby — anything with rabbits in it will do — but the older child’s interests are more specialized, and at this point it is particularly important to cater to them. Books which belong to the ages may leave him absolutely cold, and immortals like Mowgli, Huckleberry Finn, or the March sisters may seem to him remote and difficult to read. The intelligent course, then, is to treat him like those children in the nutrition clinic at Yale. All kinds of food were made available to every child, and each ate what he pleased, but— what he pleased turned out to be precisely what he needed, even to the little boy with rickets who helped himself liberally to cod-liver oil.
This method, in our opinion, works equally well with books. Your child’s deepest interests may be focused on obvious things like fishing and football or he may be fascinated by obscurities like sound waves or luna moths, but certainly, among the hundreds of juveniles which are published yearly, there will be some which will reach him. Even if, as far as you can judge, he seems to be wholly absorbed by the problems of opium smuggling on the South China coast, the chances are that you can find something unobjectionable which will ring his particular bell. We have on hand, among publications received in the last six months, books dealing with ghosts, professional baseball, Navajo Indians, steel puddling, career marriages, river piloting, platinum mink, mental hygiene, riflery, paleontology, fancy buttons, rock quarrying, boarding school, the conquest of Neanderthal man by the Cro-Magnons, and madhouses of the nineteenth century. And that’s just this year!
As to the question of whether all these books are well written or worth while, the answer in terms of adult literature is — probably not ; in terms of the child himself—very much so. A fast-paced, flashy sports story which actually gets read through is infinitely more valuable than a beautiful, sensitive book about something in which the child has no interest whatever. For example, Frances Frost’sSleigh Bells for Windy Foot is a lovely thing, most beautifully done, and ideal for the child who appreciates the warmth and charm of homely matters, but it is not the first book to select in the campaign to lure your child away from Batman. Give him Prisoners of the Redwoods, by Alfred Powers, instead, and never mind if you find a split infinitive in it. The child has plenty of time, later on, for better things.
Sometimes the child will embark on a similar course for himself. We have a well-read friend of twelve who took herself in hand when she was in the third grade. “I got a book about a girl in boarding school,” she told us. “I knew I’d like it and I just made up my mind to read it all the way through. Whenever I got discouraged I’d say, ‘You want to know what happens next, don’t you?’ I’ve never had any trouble with reading since,” she added, and walked away with half a dozen of our better review copies.
It is also interesting to note that awareness of literary merit develops along with the child. The eightand nine-year-olds will plow happily through any amount of sloppy writing, repetition, and awkward construction, intent on the story. Four years later they disdain flamboyant plots, saying scornfully, “I didn’t like it much. It isn’t very well written. Now you take Rudyard Kipling—”
Awareness of style, too, is the man; like the man, it develops in its own good time.