Are we taking the right approach in teaching kids to read, and fostering a literary and reading culture among children?

According to the stats, kids books continue to sell well, and there are a broad range of popular titles and celebrity-assigned kids’ book series that appeal to both parents and children alike. And it makes sense that kids books would sell, because parents are keen to encourage healthy behaviors like reading, so they’re more than willing to buy books to encourage kids to read.

But, at the same time, most of these titles would hardly qualify as reading, nor teaching kids an appreciation of books.

The ‘Dog Man’ series is a set of very basic comic strips in book form, and while the books average about 250 pages each, they only include about 4k words across those pages. The ‘Treehouse’ series is a joke book written by adults for kids, while Ahn Do’s kids books are simplified cliches. Many of these titles aren’t creative nor educational, yet they sell a heap, because they’re cool, and kids feel good saying that they read books, which then gains the approval of adults.

But are they really learning to read? Is this really beneficial?

I don’t know, it feels like we’re missing the point, and that the authors are often capitalizing on market trends, as opposed to contributing to broader literary education.

But then again, the counterargument would be that any reading is a positive, and kids wouldn’t bother reading at all if they didn’t have simple books like this that they can latch onto. And maybe, the very act of sitting down with a book is a positive step for literary culture in itself. But it just feels like there should be more responsibility among kids book authors to encourage increasingly complex literary trends, as opposed to making up fart jokes and pretending that they’re champions of education.

I don’t know, there’s no simple answer I guess, but we seem to be too accepting of these types of books as guides for our youngsters, when they’re likely not benefiting anyone other than the publishers of such.

Maybe I’m missing some critical link between these simple books and expanded comprehension in book form, but it seems to me like we should be more wary of what content we’re providing to our kids.