Books are good for their brains and your pocket
One of the worst things about being a parent to small children is the poor quality of the stuff you have to read them. There seems to be a glut of over-priced and over-sized rubbish these days. How I wish someone had told me that to read, for example, Postman Pat, was to hurl yourself into a purgatorial parallel universe, where time has come to a stop and human beings are condemned to suffer for eternity in a pit of agonising boredom and despair.
I might say the same for the over-rated The Gruffalo: a specimen of worse poetry it would be hard to conceive. It was such a huge liberation when a literary critic friend confirmed this negative view of the book, which had been hovering unarticulated in my subconscious. And why are the pages so thick? To fork out £5.99 to inflict such torture on oneself seems the height of madness. The author of this non-scanning doggerel needs to go back to Lord Byron and Edward Lear to see how it’s really done.
The jury is out on Richard Scarry. I loved poring over the pictures as a child, but I have a suspicion that Scarry and his industrious world might have been commissioned by a sinister cabal of top government officials and business leaders to condition a love for work in small children, with the idea that they would grow into obedient employees.
For similar reasons I am disturbed by my three-year-old’s love for Tractor Ted, Tractor Tom and Bob the Builder, all of whom seem to me part of this programme to promote the work ethic in children. It’s only a matter of time before we get Call Centre Kevin. We idlers have to be on our guard: the Puritans used literacy and books to brainwash children in the hope that they would then convince their parents of the benefits of righteousness. One commentator in the late Stuart period claimed that through their newly literate children, “parents have been restored to the knowledge and practice of morality and religion”.
The safest bet is to rely on classics and avoid anything published since 1965. You should take story time as an opportunity to catch up on your own reading. Read them A Christmas Carol, The Water Babies, Treasure Island, Animal Farm, William Blake, the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and the original, gory version of the fairy tales. To read the Narnia stories out loud is a great pleasure for the adult. Anything unreal and fantasy-like: nothing worse than kids’ stories that try to reflect reality.
I love the parent-free and screen-free world of the Famous Five. It is also easy to find old hardback editions of Enid Blyton books in charity shops. The idle parent is constantly thrifty: reject Waterstone’s and Amazon and embrace the second-hand.
Arthur also loves The Beano, but it is increasingly hard to get hold of. Our newsagent says that out of his 2,000-people catchment area, Arthur is the only one who buys The Beano. What are the other children doing? Playing computer games? Sniffing glue? Rather worryingly, DC Thomson has launched a trendy, high-energy version called Beano Max, which combines the Bash Street Kids with competitions that require the use of paying phone lines, video game features and items on celebrity footballers. When even The Beano is Americanised, what hope is there?
Reading a lot of books to the children and having a lot around the house is an easy and inexpensive way of making them clever. You must have come across those studies which say that bookish households produce brainier kids. And brains are very helpful. As my friend, Slack Dad, tells his kids, be clever and you could avoid having to get a job in the future. You’ll be living on your wits, meaning more idleness all round.
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