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Kids do read

Kids read books if parents show the example

BOOKWORM? Inspire kids to read

The first person I mention International Children's Book Day to, predictably repeats the usual line about children and reading: "Children don't read anymore". If you look a little more and deeper, you'll find, as I do, that this generalisation is spread too thin; "children" is an enormous compartment including sponge-like two-year olds, eager four, five, six and seven-year olds, adventurous eight, nine, ten and eleven-year olds, all of who do read, as well as teens, who are the ones that are "not reading anymore."

Efforts are on

If you are a parent who worries that children don't read any more and that no-one is doing anything about it, the idea of International Children's Book Day should gladden your heart because it is organised annually by member countries (including India) of IBBY, The International Board on Books for Young People, to "inspire a love of reading and call attention to children's books" as part of a worldwide initiative committed to bringing books and children together.

It works so much better when children are inspired to read because they see their parents reading.

Gita Wolf, Publisher, Tara Publishing, talks of the need to "... .to see children's writing taken seriously as a category, and not merely cute tales that anyone can write," and adds that "the idea that books need to be didactic is slowly changing, especially over the past ten years"

Harini Gopalswami Srinivasan, whose book, "The Smile of Vanuvati", has been recently released by Tulika Books says: "Children are no fools... you may pack your writing with the most interesting things in the world, but if the narrative fails to grip — anywhere from page one to the end — they will simply abandon it. No question of waiting and seeing if it improves."

Across the world, there is a now-thriving children's book publishing industry; Sweden — whose Tove Jansson and her Moomintroll are one of the earliest and most-translated children's classics of the twentieth century — Japan, Spain and India all publish children's books in several languages and dialects.

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