Children don’t need a World Book Day – but screen-addled adults do
Grown-ups are far more likely to sit down with a screen nowadays than a good book
Anyone with a social media account will know that, this week, it was World Book Day. All over the internet, parents posted pictures of their children dressed as characters from their favourite stories: The Cat in the Hat, Willy Wonka, Harry Potter, Pippi Longstocking, and so on. How charming it was to be able to spend World Book Day not actually reading any books, but instead scrolling through pictures of children dressed up as their favourite books!
But this is not a piece criticising World Book Day, which I think is a wonderful initiative, doing a lot of good for children who don’t have ready access to shelves of books (the charity, organised by the UN, aims to give every child and young person a book of their own). What I will say is that we are in danger of losing sight of the point of it – in one major supermarket last weekend, I could spend 15 quid on a BFG costume, but I couldn’t buy a copy of The BFG. Might some parents be spending more on fancy dress costumes for World Book Day than on actual books, least of all ones for themselves? Given that statistics released this week showed that 49 per cent of British adults hadn’t read a book in the last year, that is entirely possible.
Encouraging children to read is a wonderful thing, and the best way to do it, 365 days of the year, is to spend time reading yourself. All the research shows that kids who are read to by their parents, and who see their parents reading, are more likely to end up reading themselves.
Increasingly, though, this is not happening, and you don’t need to have won a major literary prize to work out why.
Grown-ups are far more likely to sit down with a screen nowadays than a good book. And while many of us worry endlessly about the effects of social media on our children, all that worry is good for nothing if we can’t keep off Facebook ourselves.
According to Ofcom, many parents now see watching TV with their children as a way of spending quality time together. This week, Dame Carolyn Mccall, the chief executive of ITV, told a conference that being “well-watched” is as important as being well-read. “Conversations around TV now have more of a book club feel,” she said. “As well as being well-read, you can now be well-watched, and that never really happened before. Spoilers are a huge social faux pas, and people are really growing much more comfortable talking about themes, production quality and great characters.”
Many parents use the hectic pace of modern life as justification for not reading books regularly – but, in many ways, that hectic pace is exactly the reason why we should be reading more. A commute is the perfect time to get some space from the working day via a book, and why take your phone to bed with you when instead you could take the latest Kate Atkinson?
Of course, some people argue that they are reading on their phones. But it just isn’t the same. Reading on your phone is like trying to read at a party with 67 different conversations going on around you; the temptation to stop reading and find out what everyone else is doing is often too great.
My daughter doesn’t need any encouragement to read. She has only learnt in the last year, and is captivated by her ability to decode what she previously couldn’t. To her, reading is magic. And if I want her to continue thinking of it this way, then I must show her that I value this magic by prioritising it over the need to check my phone.
Perhaps the people who really need a World Book Day are parents, who instead of dressing up as their favourite characters, could pay £1 to their children for the privilege of being able to sit quietly and read their favourite book for half an hour, while the kids do the same.
Otherwise, in 20 years’ time, children will be going to school celebrating World Boxset Day – dressing as Fleabag, or Villanelle from Killing Eve? – which would be a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Not, of course, that any of them will have a clue who he is.