As Ada has gotten older, I’ve had more reason to think about how childrens’ books are written and organised. Kids’ fiction is a big market, after all: as well as the newly socially acceptable crossover market, where it’s no longer particularly a stigma to read the likes of Harry Potter or the Hunger Games, children are expected to read more, particularly more fiction, than most adults will. Consider than any primary school aged child in New Zealand will be asked to work through multiple short stories or a book a week, and after their first few years to be able to offer some introspection about it, and there’s going to be a huge demand.
Watching Ada learn to read more and more, conversations with people who help out in programs like Reading Recovery, and a National Radio polemic by a rep of Unity books have left me with a strong feeling that there are two things missing in books for that 5 - 12 range, though.
Advanced Readers
First, when we talk about “reading age” or any other marker for reading ability, we tend to lose sight of a key element of childhood development: it’s fairly common for children to be better readers, mathematicians, artists, or sports players than their peers, sometimes to a dramatic degree, but it’s relatively unusual for children to have an emotional life that outstrips their peers. In part that’s because our emotional abilities tend to be a function of life experiences and physical development, which are harder to get than, say, taking another book of the shelf. It’s not that unusual to find a six year old who reads material aimed at the technical reading ability of a ten or twelve year old. It is unusual to find a six year old who operates at the emotional level of a twelve year old.
This makes for a simple problem: a few years ahead in technical ability means hitting material which is beyond the emotional capability of those children. Buying something which is an interesting technical challenge for a 6 or 7 year old who reads like 12 or 13 year old in terms of their understanding of vocabulary, structure, and ability to hold large chunks of story in their head would involve buying work which is heading into young adult territory - at which point the emotional tone is significantly more complex and, at best, irrelevant, or at worst, actively unpleasant for a younger kid. A 13 year old may find a novel about teenage crushes incredibly relevant to their emotional life. A six year old will be bemused by it.
It would be great if there were more works that addressed the kind of complexity of language and structure a young advanced reader might enjoy, but is pitched at the emotional and life experience they’re likely to have.
Delayed Readers
Conversely, there are a bunch of kids who have poor reading skills for one reason or another, and often this isn’t caught until they’re older. Reading recovery programs may have younger readers, but they also have, say, 11 and 12 year olds whose technical ability is at the level of an average 5 or 6 year old. These are not thick kids, though: these are children who missed out on the building blocks early on or have learning disabilities. And it can be a struggle to help them: there’s a social stigma around being behind, a more specific stigma around illiteracy, and often the factors that hurt them in the first place (an unsupportive or actively hostile parent, for example) don’t go away.
In that already-challenging situation there’s another ingredient, mentioned above, which is the way the overwhelming majority of material available ties the emotional age to the technical level; that’s inconvenient for advanced readers, but devastating to delayed ones. If you’re already having special assistance to help you catch up, how are you going to feel when the books you’re expected to work through are material pitched at what are, from your perspective, the babies of your school? Books like the Billie B Brown series are a great guideline for a 5 or 6 year old’s emotional life, but they’re downright insulting to the kinds of life experiences and social problems that an otherwise normal kid who’s behind in her reading is going to encounter. It adds to any stigma, and more importantly, it’s boring and unengaging. You are not going to foster a love of reading by tying it to tedium and shame.
There are a lot of older kids - pre-teens and teens - out there who find reading a challenge for one reason or another. It would be great if there was more material in the young adult section that was aimed at their more complex emotional needs while being presented with structure and language they can tackle.