Having neglected this blog over the winter, I’m intending to do a few more posts in the coming months. Among other things, I’m planning to produce a revised version of the
COOL not CUTE essay which contains my main argument. I’ve had a lot of feedback both supportive and critical in the two years since it first went online and I want to make some changes in response to this. I’ll be cutting “A Male Protagonist” from the list of “boy-friendly ingredients that are commonly missing from picture books”,
having been persuaded that that particular ingredient can't reasonably be described as "commonly missing". And I’m also planning to update the sections relating to the lack of gender balance in
children’s book reviewing and
children’s book awards having now spent some time researching these areas in more detail.
In the meantime I thought I’d highlight a couple of articles written by others with like-minded views that have recently become available online.
Sarah Threlkeld-Brown is the lead education consultant for reading at
Andrell Education and the co-creator of
Big Reading and
The Reading Criterion Scale. A former primary school teacher, Sarah describes herself as being passionate about “‘hooking’ reluctant readers into reading through fantastic texts.” As well as helping schools to develop reading strategies, she is a
Reading Expert for Oxford University Press, whose levelled reading schemes are widely used in UK primary schools.
Sarah shares many of my views about the current disconnect between what boys want to read and what reading material is readily available to them and wrote an article on this theme for
Teach Primary magazine which is now
available online. The article references some of the arguments found on this blog but also touches upon Sarah's experience of trying to keep her own son engaged with books. I recommend reading the whole article, but here’s an excerpt relating to that.
“And herein lay the problem. The books being sent home were not the books my son wanted to read. They did not appeal to his inner speed-demon or his passion for all things mechanical and gadget-driven. They did not push his adrenaline buttons in the same way as reading books about trains, planes and automobiles, or watching programmes such as Top Gear or The Incredibles. He would not read his school books; he could not see the point. I was at my wits’ end.”
Fortunately the story has a happy ending, partly because Sarah recognised that the problem lay with the content rather than the medium and helped her son find other reading material that matched his tastes more accurately. However she acknowledges that not all parents will have the time, inclination or in-depth knowledge of children’s literature to do this.
“He [now] enjoys reading, whether it’s Dirt Bike, Moto X or the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz. He reads for pleasure and for information; however, this has little to do with the early reading materials he was given by his school. I had the wherewithal to encourage and develop his reading outside school, but many parents of the boys we teach will not.”
Alison Sage has been working as a children’s book editor since 1971. She’s worked with a variety of publishers including Random House, Oxford University Press, Harper Collins and Hodder and has also written many children’s books of her own. She is the only editor I know who routinely takes stories into schools to test their appeal on children before accepting them for publication. Alison has edited nine of my books and when I first wrote my
COOL not CUTE essay, she was one of the people working in children’s publishing who gave me feedback on it before I published it online. She generously agreed to act as editor for the three essays that can be found at the top of this blog and – as always – left my writing in a much better state than she found it in!
Porter Anderson has just included several comments from Alison in a wide-ranging
article about the need for gender-balanced publishing for US website
Thought Catalog. Again I strongly recommend reading the whole article as Anderson makes many strong points, but here are some excerpts from Alison's contributions. Like Sarah, Alison draws on her own experience as a parent as well as a professional and has this to say about trying to get her own son to read.
“I realized that my younger son would do anything, anything at all, rather than “read a good book” – and his friends were the same. They had no physical problems I could see (although sometimes their parents said they were dyslexic) but their reading ages were low and their comprehension of what they had read even lower. I went into schools and talked to teachers, read with children and talked to them, trying to find out what was going on — and found that my son’s attitude was repeated up and down the country.
At that time, I had been asked to work on some reading books for a new series. The publisher wanted to know why their previous reading series was not popular, even though it was written by some of the best children’s authors — classics, in fact. The reason I discovered was that children, especially boys, love strong plots with lots happening. They aren’t so interested in the subtleties of human behavior in the abstract. They want to see it in action – quickly.”
And she goes on to say this about the conversations she and I had about the scarcity of picture books which appeal uncompromisingly to boy-typical tastes.
“We talked about what children liked to read about, especially when he had children of his own, and agreed that a few publishers’ editors were not happy with some of the ideas we felt boys would love.
Maybe — and just maybe — this was related to the fact that as small girls, they had enjoyed girls’ books and been praised for preferring cleaner, quieter play-times.”
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| The top of a Waterstones Children's Book Prize winning traits infographic from 2014 |
If you read the rest of
Anderson's article you’ll see that, given the problems with boys’ reading, both he and I were taken aback by the lack of gender balance among the authors and illustrators shortlisted for this year’s
Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. While I don’t doubt that all of the shortlisted authors and illustrators deserve recognition for their work, I do doubt that there are so few male authors and illustrators who are equally worthy of recognition. Only 3 of the 19 authors and illustrators on both the
2014 and Waterstones
2015 shortlists are male. This pronounced gender skew seems particularly inappropriate given the evidence of the
Goodreads reader analysis that was published last November.
Based on data from 40,000 of Goodread’s most active readers (20,000 female, 20,000 male) the analysis shows that both male and female readers have a strong preference for authors of the same sex. 90% of the 50 most-read books by men were written by male authors, and an identical 90% of the 50 most-read books by women were written by female authors. Goodreads’ editor in chief Elizabeth Khuri Chandler has said that responses to the analysis suggest that “most people were unaware of the gender breakdown of the book they were reading” and that “for the most part, people are saying that they don’t set out to read a male author or a female author. It’s all about the book.” From which it seems reasonable to conclude that GENERALLY female authors are particularly adept at writing books that appeal to female readers and male authors are particularly adept at writing books that appeal to male readers.
Given this evidence, if we want to encourage children of both sexes to read, it seems reasonable to expect high profile children’s book awards like Waterstones’ to highlight the best books written by both sexes. Grown-up book awards like the Booker are reasonably gender-balanced in both their shortlists and
judging panels. Shouldn’t we be trying to replicate this in the world of children’s literature?
The issues Anderson raises in his article are among those being discussed in
FutureBook’s #FutureChat on Twitter this Friday at 4.00pm UK time*, so if you’re on Twitter and have an opinion on this, he’d love to hear from you.
* Friday 20 February, 4 pm London time, 11 am New York time.
