On Writing and Small Children - by Ruth Hatfield

Every month I watch the 12^th day creeping towards me with a sense of increasingly desperate panic. What on earth am I going to write a blog post about? Every month I swear to myself that I’ll give up writing this blog, and every month I realised I’ve left it too late to quit and I’ll have to write at least one more blog post anyway, so I might as well get on with it. And then I have to climb right inside the barrel, get down on my knees and begin scraping around for absolutely anything.

The trouble is that with two very small children, I really don’t do much writing at the moment. I do a lot of thinking about why I’m not writing, and planning times to write (i.e. when the children are in bed, and asleep), and then finding that when those times come all I want to do is curl up with a book, and my brain’s full of fluff anyway. I do a lot of reading children’s books, so I really ought to find some inspiration there. But re-reading Mog and the Granny for the ninetieth time doesn’t spark off that many original thoughts about writing. I also do spend a lot of time wondering when I’ll ever get time to properly write again – by ‘properly’ write, I mean what I used to do, which was bury myself in it for hours and days on end without having to once consider whether I ought to break of at some point and scrape the dried sardine from the front room carpet.

Well, I guess the answer to that is – not for a long time. And what I’m left with is the reality of what writing means to someone with two tiny demanding dependents. I’ve definitely learnt some lessons about books: I’ve discovered that quite a few modern picture books have texts with self-referential humour that’s clearly more aimed at adults than children, and that the kids, far from being happy just to look at the lovely pictures, actually get bored when there’s all this arch stuff in the text they don’t understand. Obviously many of the books I find grindingly repetitive and annoying (a thousand apologies to Judith Kerr, but I’m looking at you, Mog) are the ones my daughter loves best. But there are some that we both love love love. Oh, Julia Donaldson! – she writes texts that sound great, and that remind me of what a living, laughing joy language can be. They make me think about how I sat down from the earliest age and began to try to paint my own pictures with the language I knew, just because it seemed like such an exciting and beautiful thing to do.

My Naughty Little Sister

Then in the past month or so I’ve been reading longer stories at bed time, and on the recommendation of my own mum, I first went through the entire five volumes of My Naughty Little Sister stories by Dorothy Edwards, and am now working my way through the collected works of Milly Molly Mandy. My daughter loves them so much that she lies listening in silence, not interrupting for the whole story (which given that she normally doesn’t stop to draw breath  is an absolute miracle). I didn’t get them at first – I remembered loving them myself as a kid, and I quite liked reading them, but it took a while for the charm to really grab me, and then I started to see what my daughter saw. They’re stories in which often absolutely nothing happens. A tiny, very domestic incident is described in great detail, from the point of view of a child. Of course it’s exactly how my daughter sees the world – things she can understand completely, written as intensely as she herself notices them. Swinging on a swing is a really interesting, thrilling and relatively new experience to a small child. (Actually, it was a relatively forgotten experience to me until a short while ago, as I hadn’t been on a playground swing since I was a teenager). You can make an entire short story out of it that a child will love. Watching your friend get a haircut. Being frightened by a vacuum cleaner. It’s all there.

Milly-Molly-Mandy

I’ve tried stories with more adventure in them, but it’s clearly not what a child of my daughter’s age wants. Which is the real thing I’ve learnt recently – the best way to find out what children like to read is to read with them. Then not only do you remind yourself of how they see the world, what matters to them and how they want to be entertained, but if you’re lucky and they like the books you liked, you might get to experience again the real pleasure of reading children’s book through the eyes of the child you once were.

So after all, it turns out that my small children are both a hindrance and an inspiration when it comes to writing. Must hold on to that. Must hold on to that…

Why I Don't Believe In A Book At Bedtime - Tamsyn Murray

I'm sure you've seen the headlines - bedtime reading is dead. OK, so maybe not quite dead, but seriously ailing. Only one in three parents read to their children every night, claims a new survey by Harris Interactive in the USA and a UK study commissioned by Pearson last year claims that more than one in six parents never reads to their child before bed. Fewer of us are spending bedtime exploring new worlds and having adventures with our children than ever before and, if that's true, I find it a little depressing. You might be surprised that I'm only slightly downhearted by the findings and here's why: I don't believe in a book at bedtime.

I have two children; one is eighteen years old and the other is a toddler, nineteen months old. Both love books and stories; my daughter first learned to read from Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell. By the time my son arrived, I was a writer myself and had access to a lot of lovely pictures books, so it was only natural that he would become interested in books from an early age. But I very rarely read him a bedtime story.

Before you all stop talking to me and I get forced to hand in my writerly membership card, there's a good reason for this; we don't do books at bedtime because we do them all day. There's a big box of utterly fabulous picture books in our living room and my son has always been encouraged to understand that they are his. He takes them out of the box, he puts them back in. He mountaineers on them, often unsuccessfully. He sits on the floor and leafs through them, babbling away to himself. The pages are dog-eared and torn. We play Spot The Book, where I spread out all the books and he brings me whichever one I ask for, one after another. And, of course, we read them together; at breakfast, through the morning, in the afternoon and sometimes in the evening. Books and stories are part of our everyday lives, they're not a special treat reserved just for bedtime.

So that's why I'm not necessarily a fan of initiatives that call for more bedtime reading. Don't get me wrong, it's a good start and I'm well aware how busy parents are. But if you make books a part of your everyday life, you stand a much better chance of fostering a love of stories that will last a long time, with all the benefits that conveys. I've even come up with a slogan: A book is for life, not just for bedtime.

So what do you think? Who's with me?