It is generally accepted that parents should instill in their children a love of reading. What for? We asked this question to the children’s writer, director of the Children’s Book Festival, Yuri Nechiporenko, and at the same time asked him to name a list of the best children’s books.
Psychologies: Is it true that children need to be taught to read?
Yuri Nechiporenko: Yes, it is almost impossible to live in a big city without the habit of reading. Without books, a person will not master the system of cultural signs of the modern world. But that doesn’t mean everyone should read. I know wonderful people who have never read books in their lives. I’m not a fan of book culture in general. For example, my grandmother — I’m not sure she read a lot. But she was a holy person. In the famine years after the Civil War, she was trusted with flour to bake bread for everyone. They lived in a peasant community, and they needed a person who could be trusted unconditionally, who would not take a crumb for himself — and my grandmother was such a person. In rural areas, a person can do without books if he has one main Book — the Bible or the Koran — or even without a book at all if he has a moral imperative in his soul. But one cannot enter urban culture without books.
What will the child get from reading?
Yu.N .: The modern world is complex, and direct perception is not enough to see and understand it. With the help of books, the child begins to navigate in it, understand complex things, gets used to solving difficult problems, and not to give in to them. And he also becomes a person — he gets to know other people, learns to feel someone else’s pain and take into account the interests of other people. On the Internet, I somehow came across the words: «Those who read books will always control those who watch TV.»
But after all, not everyone wants to control others?
Yu.N .: No, not all. But a person as a person wants to be a subject, not an object — this is the essence. He wants to be free, and books open the way to this personal freedom.
How can we instill in our children a love of reading?
Yu.N .: First of all, read yourself: with interest, delight, develop your taste for literature and read new things all the time, share what you read: retell plots, describe your impressions. Read with your child — and not even from the first years, but from the very first months of his life! So that the book becomes as familiar and necessary as a rattle, like a toy — but only a very interesting toy, behind which whole worlds open up. Read aloud with expression.