Why dads need to buy more picture books

This post was originally published on the New Statesman's Cultural Capital blog

Dads don't just need to read to their kids – they
need to start buying more picture books as well.

Books aren’t cool — or so a growing number of children seem to think. A report just published by the National Literacy Trust reveals "children are spending less of their own time reading and are increasingly embarrassed to be seen reading". According to the report, "children who do not think 'reading is cool' are four times more likely to be below average readers". I think the perception that books aren’t cool has more to do with book content than the act of reading. Specifically, it has to do with the first books most children encounter, which are picture books.

When my son was four years old, he and his friends were obsessed with Star Wars, a saga of good versus evil, packed with deadly combat, sophisticated technology, murderous villains and threatening predicaments. The Star Wars films available at the time were all U certificates, showing that — in the BBFC’s judgment — their content was appropriate for four-year-olds. Such content is rarely found in the cosier, cuter world of picture books. Picture books tend to steer well clear of deadly combat, technology is often simply represented, murderous villains are almost nonexistent and threatening predicaments are few and far between. Small wonder then that many children that relish this sort of “cool” content decide that books aren’t for them and turn to other media that reflect their tastes. For such children, the reading habit is broken before it’s barely begun.

The majority of the "below average readers" referred to in the Literacy Trust report are boys. The report shows that “nearly twice as many boys as girls say that they don’t enjoy reading at all” and “twice as many boys as girls say that they never read outside of class”. And it’s no coincidence that the type of cool content that’s absent from picture books typically appeals to boys.

In a previous piece for the New Statesman's Cultural Capital blog, I highlighted the fact that that most of the gatekeepers in the world of picture books — commissioning editors, infant teachers, children’s librarians, reviewers – are women. However the picture book industry, like any other industry, is subject to the rule of supply and demand and the most influential gatekeepers are consumers. The overwhelming majority of picture books are bought by women, consequently the picture book market reflects female-typical tastes far more than male-typical ones. Even picture books that are intended to appeal to boys partially reflect the tastes of the mother or grandmother that will usually purchase them. This won't change unless fathers and grandfathers start buying more picture books.

The Literacy Trust’s report was published to coincide with the launch of its “Literacy Heroes” campaign celebrating people who inspire a love of books. Dads are always being encouraged to read more to their children at bedtimes; I’d like to encourage dads to go one step further and commit another small act of literacy heroism by going into a bookshop and choosing a really cool picture book to read to their kids.

Gender-balanced Greenaway and Carnegie Update

My last post was in response to this year’s selection of a women-only Greenaway and Carnegie judging panel and included an email that I’d written to awards organisers urging them to adopt a gender-balanced panel for future awards.

At the end of the post I said that if anything came of it, I’d post an update on this blog.

Well, I’ve yet to receive a response form the awards organisers. I'd cc’d the email to CILIP’s Chief Executive and I did receive a prompt response from CILIP’s Campaign Manager, who told me that he’d forwarded my email to the Co-ordinator and the Chair of awards’ working party who where best placed to answer the “interesting points” I’d raised. He made it clear that they were very busy people who ran the awards on a voluntary basis and so they might take some time to get back to me. I thought I ought to give the organisers the opportunity to respond, which is why I stopped tweeting and blogging about the issue.

After six weeks of waiting I realised that the organisers probably weren’t going to respond to me, so I wrote to the media asking if they would help me raise awareness of the issue. The New Statesman offered me a guest post on their blog, which is reproduced below.

In the post I claim that “the Greenaway and Carnegie panels have for some time been overwhelmingly female.” I verified this by looking at the last few years’ judging panels as listed (or previously listed) on the “Meet the Judges” page of the Greenaway and Carnegie web site. Here’s a table showing what I found.

Year	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011	2012	2013	Totals
Female	12	12	11	12	10	9	10	12	13	101
Male	0	0	1	0	2	3	2	1	0	9

And here’s the post from the New Statesman blog.

There is a problem with boys and books — they don’t seem to want to read them as much as girls do. As a result, boys’ average reading abilities are lagging behind that of girls by the equivalent of one year's schooling. I believe this difference in appeal is partly due to a bias towards female tastes in children’s literature and in picture books in particular. Last year’s All Party Parliamentary Boys Reading Commission Report notes that the gap between boys’ and girls’ reading ability is already evident at age 5, which suggests that the problem starts at picture book age.

Although there are plenty of men such as myself writing and illustrating picture books, the gatekeepers in the world of picture books are overwhelmingly female. It’s predominately women publishers that select picture books for publication, women teachers that choose which books to read in nurseries and infant classrooms and women customers that purchase picture books for reading at home. Women aren’t keeping men out of these gatekeeper roles, the imbalance is there because relatively few men are interested in occupying them, but as a consequence picture books tend to reflect female tastes more than male ones.

Even picture books that are intended to appeal primarily to boys reflect the tastes of the mother or grandmother that will usually be buying them as well as the child they’re bought for. Picture book pirates are less prone to combat than their counterparts in other media, monsters and aliens less frightening, vehicles and machines less technically detailed. Elements of danger and threat are tamed down or omitted altogether on the grounds of being unappealing or inappropriate. In short, picture books with boy-friendly themes tend to be cuter and tamer than similarly themed TV shows, films or video games.

I think the failure of picture books to accurately reflect the full range of boys’ tastes is deterring many boys from developing a reading habit. Elements with strong boy-appeal such as combat, peril, villainy and technology that are abundant in U certificate films like The Incredibles are rarely found or diluted in picture books. I believe that one reason many children, especially boys, reject books in favour of films, TV and video games is that these media reflect their tastes more effectively.

I’ve written at length about this issue at coolnotcute.com and made several suggestions as to how male tastes might be better represented in the picture book world. One suggestion is that both sexes should be equally represented on the judging panel of the Kate Greenaway Medal, the high-profile UK children’s book award that usually goes to a picture book illustrator. The award is organised by CILIP, the professional body for UK librarians and the winner is chosen each year by a panel of CILIP members who also chose the winner of the Carnegie Medal for children’s fiction.

The Greenaway and Carnegie Medals are (to quote their web site) “the UK's oldest and most prestigious children's book awards” and widely regarded as children’s literature’s equivalents of the Man Booker Prize. However, while the Man Booker’s judging panels have been consistently gender-balanced since 1997, the Greenaway and Carnegie panels have for some time been overwhelmingly female. Last year there were twelve women and one man on the panel; this year all thirteen judges are women.

The Greenaway and Carnegie have always made an invaluable contribution to raising the profile of children’s books and promoting children’s literacy for both sexes and I don’t wish to detract from this achievement. However, if we want books to appeal to boys as much as girls, shouldn’t the UK’s “most prestigious children’s book awards” reflect male tastes as much as female ones?

I wrote to the awards’ organisers on 19 March to urge them to adopt a gender-balanced panel for future awards, but have yet to receive a response. I realise that adopting a gender-balanced panel would mean over-representing the number of men working as librarians, but surely it’s more important for “children’s” book awards to reflect the gender balance of the books’ intended readers rather than the profession that serves them? If there aren’t enough male librarians to balance a panel of thirteen, men from related professions such as teaching could be included. Or the size of the panel could be reduced until it could be balanced; a panel of five, like that of the Man Booker, would only require two men to balance it.

I recognise that, as professional librarians, the judges will do their best to be objective and take the reading preferences of both sexes into account. But no judge can be entirely objective; two librarians working in the same library might have differing opinions on the best children’s books published last year. Given that there’ll always be some degree of subjectivity, shouldn’t that subjectivity reflect the tastes of both sexes?

I don’t deny that previous year’s panels have sometimes selected books that have been very appealing to boys. And I can’t claim with any certainty that this year’s panel would select different books if it had been gender-balanced rather than women-only. However, I’d maintain that by consistently selecting panels made up overwhelmingly or exclusively of women, year after year, there is likely to be some overall bias in favour of female preferences. And at a time when we are struggling to make books appealing to boys, it makes sense to address this bias.

The Greenaway and Carnegie are wonderful awards and whichever books the judges pick this year will no doubt be worthy of the recognition that the medals bring them. However, these awards would be even more wonderful and the winning books even more worthy of recognition if both sexes were equally involved in choosing them. Such a change would also help to send out the message that books are for boys as much as girls.

For an alternative viewpoint, you might want to check out the comments section beneath the post on the The New Statesman site where book consultant and former Carnegie Greenaway judge, Jake Hope, defends the way the awards are judged and dismisses my call for a gender-balanced panel.

If you've got any thoughts on the issue, for or against, please post a comment below.

Have I got this the wrong way around? Publishers responses to COOL not CUTE!

In my last blog post I outlined some of the feedback I’d received from various groups in response to my essay COOL not CUTE. The one group I didn’t cover in that post was picture book publishers as I wanted to address their feedback in this separate post.

I wrote to all the picture book publishers I’ve worked with recently to let them know I was publishing the essay and have heard back from most of them. Most of the publishers that responded acknowledged that the issue was worthy of debate but defended the picture book industry’s current output. Most of them did so by making one or more of the following points.

1. Many picture books currently being published appeal universally to both boys and girls.

I don’t dispute this point and acknowledged it on page 8 of the essay where I wrote that “there are a great many picture books published each year that have genuine cross-gender appeal” and mentioned the collaborations of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler as excellent examples. As I wrote in the essay, my argument relates to the “relative numbers and content of picture books that principally appeal, intentionally or unintentionally, specifically to boys or girls.”

2. Many picture books are published each year with themes with boy-typical appeal such as aliens, dinosaurs, monsters, diggers and pirates.

While these picture books have themes that appeal to boys, my argument is about the ingredients that are used within these themes such as combat or villainy. Many boy-friendly ingredients excluded from picture books are commonly found in similarly-themed films and TV programmes suitable for children of picture book age.

For instance, one picture book theme that’s particularly appealing to boys is pirates. In 2012 Aardman released a U certificate film called The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! which includes all of the Missing Ingredients listed in Part 2 of COOL not CUTE. Here are some specific examples:

Combat: Characters are seen fighting with cutlasses, firing pistols and canons and hitting each other with various objects such as frying pans. The violence in the film is generally non-lethal, but one running joke involves a pirate, Cutlass Liz, killing other pirates by running them through with her sword.

Peril: Characters repeatedly find themselves in life-threatening situations and at one point the hero is almost beheaded by an executioner.

Irredeemable Villainy: The film’s villain is an evil, sabre-wielding incarnation of Queen Victoria, who’s last seen swearing vengeance on the hero.

Although many pirate-themed picture books have been published over the last few years, very few of them contain dangerous, exciting ingredients such as these. I accept that some four-year-old boys will find these ingredients unappealing and I’m not arguing that ALL picture books should include them; but in addition to tamer, cuter picture books about pirates, aliens, dinosaurs, diggers and monsters, there need to be many more wilder, cooler picture books for the children of both sexes who are currently rejecting books in favour of films and TV shows which cater to their tastes.


3. Films and TV shows may have different standards of age-appropriateness to picture books, but that’s because picture books have higher standards.

I’ve suggested that the standards of age-appropriateness applied to picture books should match those of films and TV programmes certificated as age-appropriate for picture book age children. However, some picture book publishers I’ve spoken to in the last few weeks have told me that they would not allow a four-year-old child to watch films such as Star Wars IV: A New Hope or The Incredibles, despite the U certificate indicating that the content of both these films is age-appropriate.

I’ve been using films and TV shows as a measuring stick to judge picture books against. Should it be the other way around? Is it TV and films that are getting it wrong?

The main reason I think it’s reasonable to use film and TV age standards as a measuring stick is that they are judged in a far more impartial manner. TV shows and films have their age-appropriateness assessed by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), an independent organisation that has a statutory responsibility to make such assessments.

To ensure that its judgements reflects public attitudes, the BBFC commissions regular public consultations and revises its guidelines accordingly. A report on the last consultation, comprising of 8700 interviews, can be found here on the BBFC web site. An appendix on page 79 of the report outlines the methods that were used to obtain a demographically diverse sample that represents the public as a whole.

I think this demographic diversity of views, including an equal representation of both sexes, goes a long way towards explaining the differing standards of age-appropriateness between films/TV and picture books. I think the more restrictive standards of age-appropriateness evident in picture books reflect the views of a far narrower demographic, and one that I’ve argued in COOL not CUTE is overwhelmingly female.



What do you think?
Are there any flaws in my arguments?

Have I misrepresented the counter-arguments?

Have I omitted an important counter-argument?

If so, let me know and join the debate using the comments box/link below!

Why it’s a bad idea to try to champion books by discrediting other media

Evangelists for children's books are not doing themselves or books any favours by attacking children's TV or films 

I’ve attended several children’s book events where speakers have tried to champion books to a young audience by discrediting other media and my heart always sinks when I hear them doing it. More often than not, films and television are the targets.

The oft repeated line that “the pictures are better in books than in films or television because you have to create them in your imagination,” is fine when presented as a subjective opinion.  However it's often presented as an objective statement, in which case it won’t ring true with many children brought up in an age when TV and film-makers compete to outdo each other with increasingly imaginative visuals. If a film is adapted from a book a child has read, sometimes the images on the screen will be disappointing in comparison to what that child has imagined, but on other occasions the screen versions will be more vivid, characterful and spectacular. I re-read all the Lord of the Rings books to my son around the time that Peter Jackson’s films were released in the cinema. Much as I admire the scope of Tolkien’s imagination, his prose is often pedestrian and his dialogue perfunctory and I much prefer watching the film adaptations, with Alan Lee’s masterful production designs, to reading the original books.

And the claim that “the pictures in your imagination are better” feels even more inappropriate and misjudged if there are picture book authors, illustrators and readers attending the event. I don’t think any of my picture books would have been improved by removing the pictures and leaving the readers to imagine them for themselves; the illustrations are a crucial part of a picture book’s appeal.

Worse still are the ambassadors for books who go one step further by claiming that watching TV will rot your brains. On two occasions I’ve heard such statements accompanied by readings of the song the Oompa-Loompas sing on Mike Teavee’s exit from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Here’s what the Oompa-Loompas have to sing on the subject of television (the capitalisation is Dahl’s):

IT ROTS THE SENSES IN THE HEAD!

IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!

IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!

IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND

HE CAN NO LONGER UNDERSTAND

A FANTASY A  FAIRYLAND!

HIS BRAIN BECOMES AS SOFT AS CHEESE!

HIS POWERS OF THINKING RUST AND FREEZE!

HE CANNOT THINK - HE ONLY SEES!

Having denigrated television in this way, the Oompa-Loompas go on to sing the praises (literally) of books. While I enjoy much of Roald Dahl's work, I feel that this song crosses the line from amusing satire into prejudiced propaganda in a way that the other Oompah-Loompas songs don’t. Mike Teavee’s vice is one of overindulgence; he overindulges in television in the same way that Augustus Gloop overindulges in chocolate.  Both things are bad in excess, but Dahl does not have the Oompa-Loompas denigrate chocolate in Gloop's exit song.

I don’t think that ambassadors for books are doing themselves or books any favours by attacking TV, films or video games in this way. Most children listening will know from first hand experience how appealing and satisfying these other media can be.  So by attempting to discredit them an ambassador undermines their own credibility. If an ambassador says they hate something that a child knows and loves, why should a child trust that ambassador’s judgment when he or she proclaims that books are something that ought to be loved?

I think it’s nearly always better to work with the grain of a child’s enthusiasm rather than against it when promoting books. If a child tells you they don’t like books, ask them what they do like. If it’s TV, ask them about their favourite programmes and why they like them.  Try to engage with and understand their enthusiasm — this is easy if you like the same programmes yourself. Then, when you understand what it is the child likes about the programme and, perhaps more importantly, when the child has understood that you understand this, tell them about a book they might like that contains the same sort of content.

This approach can be made to work for most children of most ages – but not all. If a child of picture book age says they like a film like Star Wars or a TV show like Ben 10, there’s little an ambassador for books can do because, as I’ve argued in COOL not CUTE, there are no picture books that match the content of Star Wars or Ben 10.  Unfortunately, there are an awful lot of picture book age children that like this sort of content  — and most of them are boys.