Posted on 04/21/2014 8:01:40 AM PDT by Olog-hai
Boys are being put off reading because of the influence women have on children’s literature, says an award-winning children’s author.
Jonathan Emmett warned that children’s books were too girly because of the influence of mostly female panels of editors, publishers, reviewers and judges.
One publishing company’s research suggested women bought 95 percent of picture books for children, he added.
The writer believes boys are being starved of what they enjoy in books, such as swashbuckling pirates, battles, or technical details about spaceships, and so are driven to more action-packed video games instead. …
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Not like there aren’t plenty of books in print and online that are non-“girly”. It’s far more than that; it has to do with family structure too, or the lack thereof.Boys turning to action-packed video games because books are ‘too girly’ for them, says award-winning children’s author
It’s true, really. The feminization of America instigated by the radical leftists and teachers unions, trying to turn boys into girls and girls into boys is going to produce a backlash of some sort. Violence is an instinct inherent to us, and we need to practice it in a controlled form to remain mentally balanced. Removing all sports from schools that show a hint of simulated violence is not going to have the expected result.
Video games also interact and engage young boys’ attention better.
I was lucky - I was read to bed each night with Kipling’s poems, Wind in the Willows and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Video games didn’t exist, though I tried to “invent” analog versions of them. I got my “interaction” with bicycles, toy guns, and then with BB guns.
The Harry Potter series was written for a woman yet has tremendous, intricate detail to interest boys.
Give a kid a copy of...say, the “Narnia” series. Sword fights, action-packed battles, betrayal, redemption....what more could a young imagination want?
(Added, naturally, with good, healthy parenting and real-life activities.)
Red Badge of Courage
Call Of The Wild
Treasure Island
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (and then Huckleberry Finn
Lord of the Flies
And that's just scratching the surface of what's out there for boys to read.
Give the boy a copy of Heinlein
Or Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Kidnapped, etc. I read them all multiple times when I was a child. Science fiction has hundreds of well written, action packed books.
What boys need are reprints of Rafael Sabatini books and books by P. C. Wren (Beau Geste), along with some of the Horatio Hornblower series.
These helped keep me from going crazy in my teen years.
Boys will be boys. Unless raised like a caring, feeling, sub human metrosexual. Then, if they get a taste of “boy type stuff” they’ll naturally gravitate to it.
"... And there was a time in this country, a long time ago, when reading wasn't just for fags and neither was writing. People wrote books and movies, movies that had stories so you cared whose ass it was and why it was farting, and I believe that time can come again!"
Darn it, you beat me to it.
Boys are chauvinist pigs if they dare to take any pride in being a man, or show any interest in manly things.
This is pretty true. My 6 year old son can’t wait to play war and shoot toy guns when he gets home from school. It’s called being boys. ;-)
It’s largely the lure of electronics. My 2yo granddaughter knows more about how an iphone works than I do.
school libraryies keeping out the good stuff??
Probably true. Solution? Don't read "Childrens' Books".
Most are rubbish, anyway, "girly" or no.
One wonders if the person quoted has been to a library and seen what’s available. I’m at the library with my children almost every week. There are plenty of books available on topics that interest stereotypical boys. Detailed studies of all kinds of animals. The “Eyewitness” science and technology series. “Ranger’s Apprentice,” “Vampirates.”
However, if they haven’t been taught to read effectively, the selection is not going to do them much good. It’s much easier to cry “Feminism!” than it is to address an educational system designed to prevent the achievement of reading fluency.
Read all the books you mentioned, plus there was a series of novels about a baseball team. Then I found science fiction.
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