Encourage children to read whatever they get

Encourage children to read whatever they get (Photo: iStock)

You can lecture children on how to behave until your mouth runs dry, but the children will end up emulating your actions/behaviour because they do not seem to have a well-developed sense of understanding through hearing. This is, I believe, why my children are readers because they have grown up with parents who read a lot.

The older one is a full-blown reader at fifteen and is already flirting with philosophy books, no thanks to me because that is the father’s kind of genre. She is into biographies, also no thanks to me, and even though she is my child, I find it fascinating when I listen to her discuss Rasputin and other historical figures with her father.

As her friends carry Mills and Boon and Princess Diaries to school, she takes with her writings of Salman Rushdie and Ayn Rand. Not to say she does not read light(er) books because indeed, she has her fair collection of the above teen-targeted books, and she loves Kinyanjui Kombani, Jennie Marima and a host of other Kenyan authors, certainly my influence as in recent years, I have concentrated my reading time on Kenyan content. With her, anything goes – she will read just about anything.

Her thirteen-year-old sister on the other hand, and I always wonder if it has anything to do with her attention span, prefers newspapers and magazines. It feels like she hates going back to a book once she puts it down. However, she still reads but unlike her sister, her genre is the Princess Diary type and Nancy Drew and fantasy here and there.  

When they were younger, we bought age-appropriate books, but we never stopped them from picking “inappropriate” ones from the bookshelves. I did keep an eye on what they were picking and noticed that when they found adult stuff, they would stop reading, and then tell me why. This was, and still is, an opportunity for me to discuss the so-called inappropriate stuff, and find out what bothers them. 

The older one has skimmed through all the books I have written and if you have read me, you might consider them too much for her age. We have discussed sexual references in my books, although there is nothing graphic about them in my opinion.

I was introduced to reading through James Hadley Chase. That is similar to being thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool. Often, I hid when I read because my young brain knew that what I was reading was beyond me, but it was either that, or not read. I wanted more than what Drum and Truelove magazines offered. David Maillu’s After 4.30 was the first saucy book I read, and I would emerge from hide-reading with a flashed face. I wish I hadn’t had to hide, reason I will not allow my children to hide. 

I chose to write about my children’s reading habits after learning that the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature failed to award the English Children’s category because none of the submissions met appropriate language standards for under twelve.

I do not blame the authors. I blame the stuck-up society we live in, the one living under Big Brother’s controlling eye, the one that wants to bring up sanitised children who are not ready to live in the real world that has all the stuff Big Brother is protecting them from.

I blame the children’s caregivers for laziness in sitting down with the children to tell them that out here, there are people who swear like truck drivers, that people will have sex, and that people will fight and be nasty to one another.

My argument for this is: Would you not rather have the children prepared for what will definitely be their life, that they can approach it from a point of knowledge? Would you rather be the one talking to them about sex, telling them why swearing at people is wrong (if you think it is)?

To me, literature is a reflection of society, fiction or not. Let children devour all books then discuss the content.

We need to stop being stuck up and allow children to experience literature in all its full glory because literature in whatever form is beautiful. It is just a matter of preference.