Children Should be Allowed to Enjoy Books on Their Own Terms, says Wimpy Kid Author Jeff Kinney
Jeff Kinney thinks children should be allowed to enjoy books on their own terms…
- by Jeff Kinney
It was my father’s job to teach us to read – I was one of four kids, and our parents were keen to give us that early leg-up.
He started us on the Dick and Jane series, which I remember as the most boring, awful books. But of course, the tedious repetition of dull phrases eventually led to mastery, which was the start of much bigger and better things.
Sure enough, when I got to school I found myself ahead of the other children, both in terms of reading and artistic skills.
It was nice to seal that advantage, and in fact, it quickly became a part of my identity; the acknowledgement and praise I got from teachers and my parents increased my motivation, which in turn further improved my work, and so on.
Our house was filled with books. My mother was an early years educator, and she’d bring home award-winning and surplus titles from the preschool where she worked.
This was normality for us – it wasn’t until I was in my 30s that I really understood how lucky we had been to have that kind of access to reading material. Realising that some kids grow up without a single book at home came as quite a shock.
My favourite books when I was young were definitely those with big, colourful pictures. But the words mattered, too – I loved Dr Seuss, for example, with his rhyming patter and crazy, creative stories.
As I got older, I discovered the great poetry and tales of Shel Silverstein; I was always drawn to that combination of masterful writing, with masterful illustration.
And looking back, I can see that I was especially happy when both aspects were the product of a single imagination, as in the work of Maurice Sendak, or Leo Lionni’s Swimmy. I don’t know exactly why, but that seemed to make the interplay between text and images particularly resonant for me
Most kids fall out of love with books a bit as a teen – and I was no exception. I would say that I was a voracious reader up to, maybe, my first two years of high school.
But at that point I started to become increasingly less likely to pick up a book for fun; and by the time I was in college, with so much required reading, the idea of doing it as a leisure activity too seemed ridiculous. Eventually, though, I came back to it; I think that’s a fairly standard evolution.
As an author, and as someone who now owns a bookstore, I certainly hoped that my own kids would be readers; but as parents, we were very careful not to force it.
I think the best thing we can do for our children is try and find reading material that speaks to their particular interests, rather than offer them the stories we loved when we were younger, or that we think are somehow ‘elevated’.
Our older son got into fantasy novels, so we kept finding him bigger and thicker books in that genre; our younger boy, on the other hand, only really liked to read about sports, so we gave him books about basketball teams, biographies of sportspeople, ‘triumph of the underdog’ tales, and stuff like that.
Interestingly, he’s recently started picking up fantasy novels, too.
I think a lot of times, when grown ups write for kids, they feel that they have to put a message in there; in other words, through reading the story, the child is supposed to learn something from the adult.
The trouble is, kids are great at sniffing out those embedded messages, and rejecting them on principal. They don’t want to be taught something – they are looking for entertainment. With Wimpy Kid, the ‘message’ is: reading is enjoyable; books are great.
And maybe that’s one reason why young people often still pick up those titles well into their teens, because they can enjoy them on their own terms.
I can totally understand that – I think that Carl Barks’ comic books represent some of the best storytelling I’ve ever read, and I still get great pleasure from reading them; so I’m delighted that Wimpy Kid has older readers as well as young ones, especially as when I started out, I was actually trying to write a nostalgia piece for grown ups.
If I have one message for primary school teachers, it would be this: I believe that putting a book into a kid’s hands that he or she will really enjoy is a sacred act.
And I think that nothing really compares to a physical book; in our store, we don’t sell digital titles, and we don’t discount books, either, because we think it’s wrong and dangerous to devalue them.
If you put a book into my hands that I loved as a child, I will instantly feel all its magic – that’s incredibly powerful. So I’d like to thank educators for taking on such a profoundly important mission. The 12th title in Jeff Kinney’s Diary of A Wimpy Kid series, The Getaway, is published by Puffin, and available in hardback now.
