[caption id="attachment_269" align="alignleft" width="193"] cover art officially by Tom Brown.[/caption]

By Nimue Brown

Lots of young people don’t read, or only read when their school teachers require it of them. Books, for many kids, are what you do under sufferance, and this is a tragedy. Young people who read develop a broader sense of the world, and learn to empathise more with others. A few weeks ago my son’s head teacher made an impassioned plea for reading on the grounds that the kids who read end up two years ahead of the ones who don’t, in terms of their intellectual development.

Reading is fun. It’s inspiring, challenging, informative, escapist, cathartic joy, depending on which book you’re holding at the time. Why don’t young people respond to this?

Part of the problem, is that if you only encounter books as something you’re made to do at school, it’s hard to see them as something fun. My son has similar issues with rugby. Young people emulate. Children are pretty much hard wired to copy what they see adults doing, which is part of why we protect them from sex and violence in films, are discouraged from smoking in front of them, and so forth. They copy us. If children don’t grow up seeing other people reading, they will not consider reading as something that is for them.

Parents reading in front of children is really important. Anyone who is not a parent to a growing child, can help out by just reading ostentatiously in public places. Flaunt your reading. For best effect, you need a paper copy so that anyone seeing you cannot mistake you for a person watching a film or wandering the internet. Read where people can see you, and maybe if enough of us do this we can help save our young people from missing out on this wonderful experience.

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