By Ginny Clark, BookStart Fund Manager
The most important thing I have learned in my years of selecting books for children from birth through three or four years is that they must be fun. Fun for the children and equally important, fun for the person doing the reading.
Almost as important is that the child must be able to identify with the characters in the story. Carla Hayden, the new Librarian of Congress and the first woman and first African-American to be in that position, said, “What’s so important about kids’ books—they can be windows to introduce them to the world, but they also need to see a reflection. They should be a window and a mirror.”
When asked her childhood memories of books, she described her thrill when she was given a book about a little girl who “looked like me.”
Actor, comedian and writer Aasif Mandvi, said in the New York Times Magazine article that he hoped to move the conversation about roles for minorities to “where you have brown characters who actually are the source of the story rather than just adjacent brown people in a predominantly white world.”
When I was first involved, twenty years ago, in providing books for children birth through age three or four to families being served by several non-profit agencies in Allen County, I became acutely aware of how intrigued black parents were with books that featured black families or black children as the main character. I could see faces light up when they saw books like Baby! Dance!, by Ann Taylor and Pretty Brown Face, by Andrea and Brian Pinkney. Or books with a real balance among the children illustrated, as in Tickle, Tickle; Clap Hands; All Fall Down by Helen Oxenbury and other books that avoid showing “a predominately white world.”
I searched out those books and ordered them when I knew that the recipient families were going to be mostly non-white. But then a friend pointed out to me that it is not just that children of color need to see themselves in some of their books. She pointed out that ALL children need to see a variety of ethnicities represented in their books. ALL children need to see people who DON’T look like them front and center sometimes, as well as seeing themselves. I had been seeing the work we were doing from only one perspective. She gave me a wonderful gift of awareness.
It is challenging to find books that match this criteria, though. In my current and on-going search for appropriate books to buy for the BookStart program, I still see many delightful books that are either all white or set “in a predominately white world,” in Mandvi’s words. I rarely see the reverse. Often I fall back on books with anthropomorphized animals, which avoids the problem in a fun way. The mouse family in Goodnight Moon, all the characters in Sandra Boynton’s hilarious series of raps and rhymes, and the scared baby owls waiting for mommy in Owl Babies are clearly human in their feelings and actions. The human child lucky enough to be hearing it in the loving circle of a parent’s lap understands this with no explanation needed.
In 2014 Dana Wichern and I set up The BookStart Fund at the Community Foundation of Greater Fort Wayne to receive donations that are used solely to purchase books for families served by several social service agencies in Allen County. The families are mostly low-income, facing many challenges, some with few or no books in the home. BookStart is a partner with these agencies, providing carefully selected board books that the agency staff present as gifts to parents and children together, usually in repeated home visits. Most of the many hundreds of families in these programs will receive at least 12 new books for each young child in the home. What a wonderful gift our donors are providing!
Sharing the joys of books can be a life-changing gift. Books are where the words are! A wealth of words is hidden in the pictures in every good book for toddlers, giving parents a simple and happy way to “teach” their children. Children’s books can be windows to the world, as Carla Hayden said. I imagine that it was her love of books as a child that led her to her position today of Librarian of Congress. It all starts with books in the home.
Published in The Journal Gazette, May 16, 2017
Source: The Reading Rainbow