Now, more than ever, young children need to be read to – David Thorpe

Penny Dolan wrote here on 1 March, World Book Day, that she was in a library reading to children. How ironic then that on the same day Northampton County Council announced it was closing 21 libraries and only opening another 21 just one day a week, because of spending cuts.

What a short-sighted decision. Every time a library closes, part of a community dies. Literacy and libraries are part of the glue that binds the members of communities, they provide intellectual and emotional nourishment which, in the case of children, may later help them become more mature members of whatever community they come to live in, and grow into more rounded social beings.

Last month saw the publication of yet another report showing a decline in the number of parents reading to children, saying that less than half of pre-school parents now do this.

There was also another report, that paediatric doctors are finding that children are starting at primary school unable to hold a pencil properly because, rather than being encouraged by their parents to draw or write, they are given iPads or e-notebooks, resulting in diminished digital (in the original sense to do with fingers) dexterity. This impairs their ability to write.

All of these trends bode ill for the future. Reading and writing go together like milk and cereal. Both together nourish the mind and promote healthy intellectual growth. Kids need the added cognitive nutrients that books serve up by stimulating their imaginations and feeding their ability to form critical attitudes.

As Dianne Hofmeyr wrote here a couple of days ago, writers and illustrators – and publishers – are nowadays unafraid to produce books tackling difficult (some say 'dark') subjects. This is not darkness for the sake of darkness, but darkness because without it we – children included – do not fully appreciate the light – and vice versa: without the light we do not appreciate darkness.

We all experience darkness at times, so difficult subjects should be addressed – but with care, to promote understanding and empathy and help stimulate discussions by children. Only by coming to terms with these unpleasant experiences can we become fully rounded adults.

If children's books can help just a little to achieve this then they have done a great job - part of the reason that we have literature.

And part of the reason why we need libraries and need to read to children to get them into the reading habit.

Why do we have to keep repeating this demand? I feel I've been saying this for years. Isn't it obvious? Or is it just that too many other pressures are crowding books out despite it being obvious?

A weekly journey to the library was a staple of my own childhood, and opened my otherwise narrow world to a universe of possibilities. I would not be a writer – with the motto on my website "With imagination we can change the world" – without that library.

When my kids were smaller I looked forward so much to reading to them every night, and so did they – it was a terrific bonding experience. I miss it. I miss reading all the brilliant new books for kids, too, that have come out since – often borrowed from our local library – as well as the old favourites.

If I didn't read to them I made up my own stories – or we would do it together. They might give me an idea to start with and off we'd go, conjuring a new tale out of the air, a collective act of magic. Often I would draw pictures at the same time, illustrating the story while telling it, and we'd end up with a sheet of paper like a scribbled comic book page.

I'd catch my own kids using the box of coloured pens and pencils and stack of paper we always left on the low coffee table for them, scribbling away at drawings while chattering away happily to themselves – making up scenarios and illustrating them, explaining to themselves what they were drawing while drawing it – complete with sound effects (explosions, fights)!

It taught me that drawing is never just drawing but part of a narrative-making process, or perhaps a ritual, and I gained the idea that perhaps cave drawings made by long-ago humans (and Neanderthals, we now know, as well) could have been made the same way – as a collective activity that included the recital of a story or the chanting of songs or the acting-out of a scene. The original multi-media happening.

For culture is what sets us apart from all other animals. This ability to use language, pictures and story-telling is what constructs us as uniquely human, it helps fashion our social sophistication, it is the evolving skeleton of our world-view-making.

Parents must read to children. Libraries must be in every community – they are palaces of wonder. These two things should be laws and breaking them punishable by being made to learn George Orwell's 1984 off by heart. They would be if I were PM.

[I am the writer of Marvel's Captain Britain, the sci-fi YA novels Hybrids, Doc Chaos: The Chernobyl Effect and the cli-fi fantasy Stormteller. I also run a regular writing course, called 'Making Readers Care' that can be taken online. Contact me if interested.]

Stop paying attention

“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
(Simone Weil, French philosopher, 1909-1943)

Do you have New Year's resolutions? (Have you broken them yet?) Was one of them to spend less time on social media and more time paying attention to important things or people in the real world? If so, have you actually thought about what we mean by 'paying attention to'?

Attention requires a single-minded 'attending to' of something. It's been eroded and devalued by our increasing tendency to respect urgency, and to divide our attention between competing calls on it. We proudly claim to be good at multi-tasking, but that is really just attention-fragmenting. It can be useful if the tasks are not personally meaningful, but otherwise it can be quite detrimental. If you can do the washing up at the same time as working out a weekly schedule, that's great. Neither task deserves much of you and they need different types of attention.

It's in our engagement with other people, and with meaningful thought, including in books and other art forms, that full attention is needed. If you read a poem while wondering what to make for dinner, if you have a serious conversation with someone while trying to fillet a fish or untangle a knotted string of beads, you won't get the most out of the encounter. In the case of the conversation, the other person will also feel short-changed: you aren't paying enough attention. Notice the financial metaphors.

Some situations do demand a bit of contorted attention-bestowing. As readers, we need to attend to the book we are reading to get much out of it. As readers-to, which we often are when engaging with young children, we need to attend to the book and to the child's reception of it. We are both readers-of and readers-to at the same time. We are a conduit for the story (I will call it a story for simplicity, though it need not be a fiction book), but a conduit which adds to and changes the story.

When a bullet is shot from a gun, the gun barrel makes marks on the bullet, physical changes which ballistics experts can use to prove a particular bullet came from a particular gun. It's not a particularly child-friendly analogy, but in the same way when we act as a reader-to we put some of our own stamp on the story. The same story read by someone else is not actually quite the same story even if the same words are used. Another person might use different intonation, speak faster or slower, turn the pages at a different speed, and so on. We need to focus, as readers-to, on how we affect the story and how the child responds to it. We also need to be aware of other cues: are we shuffling impatiently, hurrying towards the end, wondering if the child is going to sleep yet, hoping we don't have to read the same story a tenth time?

Watch how the child attends to the story. They are engrossed, taken over by it, captivated. They give it their whole attention and don't want it to end - which is why they want it again and again. Do you notice something? We pay attention and the child gives attention. The child does not occupy a transactional space as we do. We have come to see time as a commodity and we 'pay attention' by giving time. But if we are paying it's not really giving, is it? And that's where we lose out. We pay attention like we pay bills. Paying has connotations of loss, resentment, exchange. Teachers tell children to 'pay attention'. You have to 'pay attention' when you are driving or get into trouble for driving without 'due care and attention'. 'Due' - there's that financial metaphor again.

Simone Weil's idea that attention is generosity is inspired. To give our attention to someone or something must be a selfless act. We give attention to the read-to child and to the story. When the child is captivated by the story, they won't be taking any notice of you. You are effectively invisible - the conduit, remember - just their pathway into the story. So you give this attention with no expectation of reward (though rewards will come, spontaneously) because you delight in the child's pleasure. And when the child (or anyone else) talks to us, we give them their attention if we are being genuine - we don't pay it.

It would be disingenuous to say that we get nothing back from giving attention. We reap immense rewards - but it is not a transaction. As in any exchange, you don't get back what you give. You give your time and your engagement. You will be rewarded with connection, satisfaction, the good feeling that you have made someone happy, and - in the end - with a child who is also able to give attention to otheres. The read-to child relishes the story because it is both a story and a gift of attention. It validates the child, shows you care enough and like them enough to give your time and attention. You give it, too, when you listen to the child and don't dismiss their worries or hurry them along.

Being readers-to is a way of being attention-givers. It's also a bounded way, and that is useful, too. The story comes to an end, we leave the magical kingdom, we each return to our own lands. Babies are attention-junkies. They need attention almost all the time in order to survive. As they grow, we wean them off it, leaving them - if all goes well - able both to cherish the attention we give them and to give attention to others, but also able to sustain themselves.

So my New Year resolution will be to try to do less multi-tasking, to give my attention - all of it - to whatever I am attending to and to nothing else. I think I will get as much done, perhaps more: I may well read Mog's Box an extra 40 or 50 times.

Anne Rooney
Latest book: not even sure. I'm not paying attention to the publishing schedules.