Why We Pick Excellent Literature to Shape Our Family’s Imagination
My husband and I are extremely picky about the books our kids read, and I preread and reject a dozen for every one or two that I hand off to the kids. Okay, at this point you may be thinking we’re compulsive about a relatively unimportant area of our children’s lives. After all, it’s just books!
For our family, though, books are the single most influential media form we encounter. We watch very little TV, we only watch from a cultivated list of quality movies, and we don’t listen to the radio. The kids are not allowed online, other than for school assignments. Our kids spend more time daily with books than with any particular toy. Because of this focus on books, we’ve decided that we have a responsibility to ensure that the books we read are excellent. Partially this emphasis on books is a choice we make because Derek and I both love to read, but it’s also important to us because of the role that stories have in shaping the moral imagination of our children. St. Augustine said that we’re defined by what we love. I want my children to love “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise.” What kind of literature trains the mind towards what Lewis calls “the baptized imagination” so that the individual loves these Philippians 4:8 qualities? The best kind of literature for this task is that which is of moral and aesthetic excellence.
How realistic is this goal? It’s helpful to compare it to food. Parents can train their child’s literary palate just like we train our kids’ taste for food. Growing up, my mom spent just as much or more time discussing the writing style of my books as the moral questions. I was an early and voracious reader, and I don’t think she could possibly have had the time to keep up with everything I read, but we read enough together that I had a very good sense of what she’d think of a book’s style even if she hadn’t read it. You don’t have to have been an English literature major like me—my mom was trained in microbiology!—to point out to your child a beautiful turn of phrase or a melodramatic and unsatisfying plot line. C.S. Lewis says in “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” that “a children’s story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children’s story. The good ones last.” If you as an adult find a children’s book unsatisfying, it’s a good bet that your child doesn’t need to read it. If you still find yourself captivated by the illustrations or storytelling of a children’s book, it’s usually a sign that the book was created with care and attention to the rules of good writing. At the very least, parents who don’t have the time to keep up on their kids’ reading can educate themselves on the authors (generally, books found both on the Newberry or Caldecott Honor lists and in a compendium such as Books Children Love, Honey for a Child’s Heart, Read for the Heart, or The Book Tree will be works of both moral and literary excellence).
If the aesthetic merit of a book matters, how do we teach young children to discern it? We learn the difference between great and badly-written literature by studying the rules of grammar, composition, and rhetoric. We also learn this practically by reading good examples. It’s hard for a five year old to explain the difference between the clean prose of Laura Ingalls Wilder and the sloppy writing of the latest mediocre kid-lit writer, and that’s why it’s so important to fill his mind with good writing so that he’s developed a taste for excellence. Children who hear proper English spoken all the time naturally pick it up and may cringe at poor grammar even before they’ve studied it in school. (I naturally say “This is she” on the phone because my mom modeled that for me years before I learned about the difference between objective and subjective pronouns.) The child exposed primarily to well-written literature can learn in time to distinguish for himself when he picks up junk, even if he can’t yet elucidate the exact literary techniques in question. (This applies to illustrations, too. We try to expose our kids to great children’s illustrators—Tasha Tudor, Beatrix Potter, Robert McCloskey, Ezra Jack Keats, and Gyo Fujikawa are some of our favorites from the picture book stage—because why not spend time looking at real art instead of computer-generated mediocrity?) You wouldn’t train your child’s palate by serving them only chicken McNuggets and spaghettios; why are so many parents content to give their kids literary junk food and yet expect that they’ll be able to appreciate Austen or Shakespeare?
While the ideal is for me to serve my children home-cooked, from-scratch meals every day, sometimes that isn’t going to happen (especially when I’m in the midst of a difficult pregnancy, moving into a new house, or taking a foster child to eight therapy appointments a week). All of us have other jobs and responsibilities outside of parenthood and homeschooling that will prevent us from controlling the quality of every bite that goes in our kids’ mouths or every book that they read. And this is okay. It is not sinful to eat box brownies or read a bit of twaddle. But we aspire to feed our children’s tummies with wholesome, real food and their minds with excellent, real literature.
And of course we should pick the cream of the crop when we’re doing our family read-aloud time. My whole family grew as readers by listening to my dad read aloud David Copperfield, The Lord of the Rings, and A Christmas Carol. I don’t know anyone who objects to the values or the beautiful writing of The Chronicles of Narnia, so that’s a great place to start! We’re currently going through that series again for the younger ones, who weren’t old enough to remember our last couple times through Narnia. It’s just as wonderful this time around!
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