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Parenting

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lady Massey on introducing this useful and timely debate. My congratulations are due also to the   noble Baroness, Lady Tonge, on her vigorous and heartfelt maiden speech. I declare an interest by mentioning a scheme which is a brainchild of a group of publishers. Entitled Quick Read, it aims to produce short books for adults who have just learned to read but who do not know where to begin. I am one of the writers who have been commissioned to write one of these 20,000-word books of mono- and disyllabic words, short sentences and short paragraphs. This may seem a long way from parenting, but I suggest that it is crucial to it. If these brave and hopeful people had been read to as children and accustomed early to the printed word, I wonder if they would now be in a situation which is most usually experienced at the age of five. Searching the Internet, I found no fewer than 19   websites on parenting. I may have missed something, but the only reference that I could find to reading was on a site devoted to making speech and language-learning a priority in a child’s life. The reference was merely a sentence suggesting that books could be used for pointing out the names of objects. Another site suggested,"““creative ways to teach your child to tie his shoelaces””." Another advertised the TV Timer, a device which allows you to set a maximum of three viewing periods a day, thus giving you control over your child’s television watching. I found nothing about reading. People read less than they used. It is particularly true to say that children read less. Television, DVDs, videos and computers have taken the place of books in their lives. This is an easily understandable change when we consider the instant appeal of action, the spoken word, music and singing, all of which are served up with very little effort on the part of the viewer. It takes a remarkable strength of mind on the child’s part to resist the allure of the media in favour of the printed word unless—and this is a very important ““unless””—they have been accustomed to the look, feel and contents of a book from early childhood. At the present time, as my noble friend Lady Massey pointed out, there are more children than most literate adults would believe possible who have never seen a book, would fail to recognise a book and would have no idea what it is for. In a literacy project in which a friend of mine was involved, she was asked by a child of five if the book he was shown contained something edible. Its outside he took for packaging. It seems that parents no longer read to their children; how tempting, when they are tired or overworked, is the television—what an edge it has over the book—even supposing that they possess books. Yet reading to a child, particularly to a child settling down to sleep at night, is a fine and valuable tradition, which confers more benefits than are at first apparent. A child who is read to will wish to read herself. A child in whose home is a bookcase of books will grow up habituated to the presence of books and take them for granted as part of the furniture, as he takes the TV set and the phone for granted. I am not of course saying that the child who reads will never truant from school, experiment with drugs, join a gang or become a teenage parent, but I am suggesting it is less likely that these misfortunes will befall them. This, I believe, is because while film, television, videos and computer games entertain but offer no stimulus to the imagination, reading opens up   to children whole new worlds. Excitement and adventure is not fed into them; they have to go in there and extract it for themselves. And books are not expensive—not when you think how long even a paperback lasts and how it may be passed from parent to parent and child to child. Also, not to be passed over, there is the public library, which is still primarily—no matter what excellent access to the Internet it offers, what refreshments and diversions—a repository of books. Government can do much here to encourage parental reading and the use of books. Reading to one’s children and offering them the means to read, reading oneself to set an example—these things alone will not make a good parent, but they will go a long way towards making a good and happy child. I do not mean to be frivolous, but since children so often seem to wish to do the things that their parents have banned, perhaps a website should offer for sale a reading timer. But I fear that things do not work out that way. It is time that parenting groups, which are becoming increasingly popular, included on their agenda something on the desirability of reading with your children. We should also remember that the older siblings who have been read to and now read for themselves will often be anxious to teach the younger ones to read early, perhaps in pre-school days. Immense value lies in sharing activities with one’s children. Public participation in sport is excellent, of course; so is the concept of a whole family watching television or listening to music together. But perhaps there is something unique in the idea of mother or father sitting down to read to one child, or two or three. This is a sharing of minds and of response which must lead to a divergence of views, for each family member will interpret what they read aloud or hear in differing ways. And each one of them, in time to come, will look back and say, ““Do you remember when you read Harry Potter to us, or that other Potter—Beatrix—or Roald Dahl?””. One aspect of good parenting is sharing a good book with one’s children and thus avoiding the sad situation, when they are older or much older, of needing the Quick Read with which I began this evening.