Johnny can read but he doesn't want to
Johnny can read. He just doesn’t want to. Adolescent boys read less than any other segment of the population, studies show. Girls between 8 and 13 read, on average, a grade and a half better than boys, according to child development studies cited by Michael Sullivan, a children’s author and librarian from Portsmouth. This developmental gap, which closes by about 13, often leads adults to ask boys to read on their own before they're ready -- because the girls are doing it. In addition, parents, librarians and teachers often fail to encourage boys to read the kind of books boys like, he says. By 13, many boys have already decided reading is not for them because they’re not good at it, or because it’s not a “manly” activity.
Sullivan wants to turn boys into lifelong readers by changing the ways we encourage reading. Children follow adult models, and mothers are ten times more likely to read books than fathers. Fathers should read books to their sons, and with their sons. Reading to a boy is almost as effective as having the boy read, and taking turns reading means the boy has to do only half the work. Men tend to read in private, but they should let their sons see them reading.
“Boys are less likely to read books, and when they do, they often don’t read the ones we want them to. Newspapers, how-to manuals, and other brief informative texts fill boys’ need to understand how things work, but they don’t provide boys with the sustained, language-rich reading experiences they need to become mature readers,” Sullivan says.
But we adults urge boys to read the wrong books, he says. Boys need something physical to engage their brains. They like adventure or fantasy. Non-fiction satisfies boys’ need to understand the world. But when teachers assign students to read a book, non-fiction is usually off-limits, along with gross humor and scary stories. “We insist that all children read books that emphasize the emotional rather than the physical. We define ‘good books’ as those that conform to the way girls think,” Sullivan says.
Sullivan just published the second book in his four-part effort to create boy-friendly reading. “Escapade Johnson wants to be a writer, but he is frustrated by being the most boring kid in Sanbornton, NH, which is the most boring town in the most boring state in the country. His classmates make up the most feared and troublesome class the school has ever seen, and Escapade moves in a circle of larger than life characters through his various adventures,” he says.
Book two, “The Coffee Shop of the Living Dead”, starts with Escapade just once letting go and having fun headless of the consequences, and of course that one time lands him in hot water. The third book, scheduled for release in September, will be “Escapade Johnson and the Witches of Belknap County”, and the fourth, which will be out in 2008, will be “Escapade Johnson and the Phantom of the Science Fair”.
“The purpose of the series is to be fun, humorous, light reading that is really designed to be read aloud to kids as much as it is for kids to read themselves,” he says.
I never read the “boy friendly” books I was assigned in seventh grade, Treasure Island and Johnny Tremain. The teacher made us memorize, and take tests on, long lists of antique Victorian words in Treasure Island. (A hawser is the rope that holds the anchor to the ship.) I read the Classic Comic instead. And I’d already seen the Disney version of Johnny Tremaine on television.
In middle school, I devoured biographies of sports heroes: Willie Mays, Ted Williams, Jackie Robinson, Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig. There was a book I loved about Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, and one called To California by Covered Wagons. I also read non-fiction books about jazz musicians, presidents, and an African American hero no one remembers today named Ralph Bunche. He was instrumental in creating the United Nations and bringing the State of Israel into existence, which were very important parts of my family’s history. As a child in the Detroit ghetto, Bunche sold newspapers for a penny.
My 6th grade teacher, meanwhile, was making the class do a book report every week from her list about “children from other lands.” The books I was reading “on my own” didn’t count. The teacher hadn’t read them and didn’t know if they were suitable. I remember one from her list about a Korean boy caught in the middle of the Korean War, and another about children escaping from behind the Iron Curtain. These books were fiction, but the characters rang true, and they were coping with real things. There were 30-some weeks in the school year, I fell two reports short of the one a week requirement, and I can’t remember anything else I read from that list.
One Christmas, I bought my godson Dr. Seuss’s wonderful environmentalist book The Lorax. Jeremy was a “big boy,” so I asked him to read it to me. It was painful watching him figuring out those made-up words, and it was awful for him to see the disappointed look on my face as he did the best he could. We should have read the book together. He’s a father now. Maybe he’ll read it with his son.
