‘Children deserve to have books to fire their fertile imagination’
YOU would think from the levels of library closures we have seen in recent years that books were a luxury.
Wrong.
If you are reading this, you are one of the fortunate ones. You can afford to buy a newspaper or get online to read it there. For so many people in our country now, that is an unimaginable extravagance.
Putting hot food on the table for themselves and their families is hard enough and every day we hear reports of the consequences of having to choose between heating and eating.
Poverty is like a cancer – if you survive it, the memory of it never leaves you. The damage cuts deep, and the fear of a recurrence shadows the rest of your life.
Children suffer most of all. We know that their life chances are limited by poverty in their early years. Only this week, we learned that life expectancy suffers because of the illnesses of poverty that do not emerge until later in life.
And it’s not just their physical condition that is affected. Levels of depression and other mental health problems among children and young people are at record levels. Educational attainment is slipping too – it’s hard to concentrate on learning when you are dazed with hunger.
This winter, at least a fifth of all families in Scotland will be struggling to make ends meet, through no fault of their own.
It’s not just individual households that are being damaged by the rising costs of living – it’s the very charities that are committed to supporting them.
All over the country, more and more people are turning to food banks to feed themselves and their families. But the food banks themselves are stretched to their limits and we regularly hear about parents starving themselves to put food in the mouths of their children.
What we do not hear so often is that hearts and minds starve as well as bodies. Under pressure, family bonds are stretched to breaking point. Again, it’s the children who suffer most.
This is just one of the reasons why books matter. Reading bedtime stories, sharing a book, brings parents and
children closer. It starts conversations and stimulates imagination, giving birth to the idea of possibility. Without books, it’s not just children who lose out.
Stories comfort children too. When you are stuck somewhere you don’t want to be, books can transport you to another place, another time.
We all remember the shaming of the kids in the class who stumbled over reading aloud.
Having books at home is a practical way to improve children’s performance at school. They become more accomplished readers, which opens doors and increases their confidence.
I know from my own experience the practical value of books. When I was a child, books were an expense my
working class parents couldn’t afford – and certainly they could not have kept pace with my habit once I learned to read for myself. But I could borrow books from the local library and the school book box.
I devoured stories and, through them, I learned about a world whose horizons would otherwise have been unimaginable for a wee lassie fi’ Fife. I was a lonely only child and as a result of reading other people’s stories, I began to make up my own tales. Whichever book I was reading, I would inject myself into and push the stories in different directions.
That opening up of creativity is not confined to writing. The grandson of one of my gran’s neighbours used to
draw beautiful comic book versions of the books he had been reading. One of my schoolmates ended up as a professor of history because his dreams had been set on fire by reading swashbuckling historical fiction.
If we are at all serious about ending cycles of deprivation, about creating a country with economic growth, about building a citizenry at ease with itself, we can make a big start by providing books to those who lack them.
That’s why the Scottish Book Trust is running an appeal to give children a very special gift this Christmas. Families dependent on food banks need more than just a full belly. They deserve an imagination filled to the brim. The chance to change their destinies starts here.
Reading bedtime stories, sharing a book, brings parents and children closer. It starts conversations and stimulates imagination