As a child, did you ever want to grab your bicycle and go off on an adventure with your best friends? Or climb the Faraway Tree and discover strange magical creatures? Or live on a clifftop boarding school and be captain of the lacrosse team, even if you didn’t know what ‘lacrosse’ was?
If you grew up reading British author Enid Blyton’s books, your answer is probably ‘yes'.
Click start to play the Weekend Crossword, which celebrates children’s books and authors.
Books are portals to a different time, place, and reality. To an imaginative child, reading can be a powerful, meaningful way to learn about the world and one’s place in it. Thousands of studies all point to the same conclusion – reading benefits children in significant ways.
According to US-based Child Development Institute’s website, children who read books regularly are known to have better concentration, memory retention and analytical skills.
Reading fiction, in fact, has been found to ease anxieties that preschoolers and older children may experience with the stress of the many ‘firsts’ they go through – whether it’s the first day of school, the first examination, or the first performance in a school play. A study by Mindlab Insights, a data analysis centre at UK-based University of Sussex, found that reading for as little as six minutes a day can reduce one’s heart rate and stress levels by 68 per cent.
Unfortunately, children are reading less than ever before. The UK’s National Literacy Trust, a nonprofit organisation that promotes literacy, found that in 2019, just 26 per cent of under-18s spent some time reading each day. It’s the lowest level recorded since 2005. Their survey also found that boys read less than girls. Remarkably, a third of the children surveyed reported they were unable to find things to read that interested them.
Could it be because children’s books are notoriously bad at portraying diversity? If children are unable to relate to characters in books, they could be less inclined to follow through with the story.
According to a study by US-based University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Cooperative Children’s Book Centre, in 2018, there were more children’s books featuring animals and non-human characters (27 per cent) than all types of visible minorities combined (23 per cent). And half of all the children’s books reviewed featured white people.
Now, the publishing industry is working to close the diversity gap. With grassroots organisations like US-based We Need Diverse Books and UK’s Book Trust pushing for improvement in the representation of characters, we may see more varied ethnicities in children’s books.
Who knows? If children see themselves in the pages of a book, it might just get them to read till the end of the book… and the next... and beyond.
Play the Weekend Crossword and celebrate books that spark children’s imagination and love for reading. Tell us if you enjoyed it at games@gulfnews.com.
