Ann Cameron's comments for parents
About childhood
I was a child of the Fifties, growing up in a small town. My friends and I skied and played baseball in vacant lots, and invented our own projects. Outside our autonomous world of play, we were raised to see our teachers and parents as ultimate authorities, and it never occurred to us that an American president could be anything less than perfect.
We were idealistic, but ours was a shallow and uninformed idealism. American history rarely came alive for us--as now, classes valiantly pressed forward from the Pilgrims to the Gilded Age, then fell back to start again with the Pilgrims, year after year.
We had no idea from school of the pain and the ideals of our parents' time--the poverty and hardship of the Depression,. the great struggle against Hitler and Nazism. When we got older and were asked to sacrifice for the dubious cause of war in Vietnam, many of us were outraged, not only because the cause was dubious, but because nobody had ever suggested any kind of sacrifice might ever be our lot in a perfect and benign America.
I'm talking about a small-town in Wisconsin, where almost every child was white and middle-class. African-American children of our generation must have known a lot more. (So that children will understand U.S. history and care about it, get your school and public library to buy the ten-volume A History of Us by Joyce Hakim--a series that makes U.S. history come to life.)
We all know childhood today is very different. There's a very good analysis of the differences in Kay S. Hymowitz's Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Their Future and Ours. My own feeling is that childhoods now are often more cynical, less rooted in personal experience than they were in my generation. Lonelier, and less free. Expensive and excessively organized by adults. I hear of four and five-year-olds playing competitive soccer. Doctors, I read, are concerned that "heading," or taking blows from the ball on their skulls can cause headaches and mental confusion, even permanent brain damage in pre-adolescent children. I am horrified not only by the physical dangers, but by the psychic dangers. I'm appalled that some kindergartners are being taught to compete and hurt each other before they've ever learned to trust, share, cooperate, and develop their individuality. I think parents who want children to grow up so fast should not have had children in the first place.
I am sorry for the children whose moneyed parents fear they won't do well if they haven't gotten into the right kindergarten. I pity the parents for their fears and their glaring absence of confidence in their children. I pity us all for living more and more in a world where only labels seem to matter.
One of the solutions to the current situation is to strengthen our public schools and all our public institutions. To work for a decent minimum wage, too. Recently the mother of a six-year-old in Michigan, although addicted to drugs, worked two jobs and was away from home 14 hours a day. She earned only $250 or $300 a week. She couldn't pay the rent . She was evicted and her son went to stay with an uncle, in a crack house. That's where he was living at age 6, when he shot and killed a first-grade classmate. There are many questions about how this killing could have happened, but one is, how could a mother working so many hours earn so little money? If she had had time to spend with her son and a place to live, would he have killed another child at age 6?
Upper-middle-class families with two parents working have more money but not much time for their children. Family time, which abounded in my childhood, has disappeared. And in a strange way, money has replaced sex as a social taboo. Most American children now know where babies come from--but they don't have a clue where money comes from or how to manage it. A very helpful book on this subject is Janet Bodnar's Dollars and Sense for Kids: What They Need to Know About Money and How to Tell Them.
Spending on children can ease parental consciences about having no time for them. When spending becomes a love substitute, children get desperately greedy. Wanting stuff becomes an addiction. Before spending, parents need to think about what, if anything, the item bought will contribute to a child's emotional and intellectual development. If the item makes a negative contribution, don't buy it.
Instead, when children are old enough--sixth grade or so, teach them about the stock market. Buy them a share of stock to follow instead of a new Nintendo. If they wonder why speculators make millions while workers make pennies, that's something more to think and talk about.
Middle-class Americans tell me that children's birthday parties have become enormously expensive, costing hundreds of dollars, involving pizza for all, special party themes, and special party theme napkins. If you don't have money, don't want to waste money, and don't want to give your children special birthday lessons in greed, try a new kind of birthday party. Have children bring toys and books they no longer want to the party, to be donated to children in homeless shelters. Or create parties that are low-cost and really special, with the help of Einstein's Science Parties: Easy Parties for Curious Kids by Shar Levine. This book provides easy experiments children can do which will make them marvel and think too. All of the materials needed for the experiments are inexpensive and easy to find. Ms Levine has a dozen other books of easy-to-do at-home science experiments that children will love. There's nothing like carrying out interesting projects to build children's mastery of the world and their self-esteem. Another way to broaden children's worlds is to ask them to contribute a small amount of money to be given to a charitable organization that helps children. Adult retirement parties and 50th anniversaries for people who already have everything also can be a good time for this charitable donations.
Another way to save money and educate at the same time:
Use your public library
Buying children Power Ranger videos teaches them violence and costs you money. Reading good books with children doesn't need to cost you a cent, if you visit your public library. And it's the best way to insure that your children come to love learning.
The library is the place to get a start on reading with your
child. Unlike most 
bookstore
clerks, librarians know books. They can tell you what is likely
to appeal to your child, or find an unusual book to fit special
interests. If you want advice, they can counsel you on how to
read aloud with your child. (This is me with a library book in
the summer time when I was nine.)
Begin weekly trips to the library when children are three. Seeing so many books in one place will arouse your child's awe and curiosity. Discovering that these books belong to the community will give a first understanding of the meaning of community and the benefits of sharing. Seeing books for adults, and adults reading them, will show that learning has no limit and is for people of every age. Make the library part of your children's life early, and for a lifetime they will find pleasure in learning, dreaming, imagining.
Reading aloud to children
Reading aloud to children daily from earliest infancy, with many repeated readings of the books they want to hear over and over, is the best way to help your children on the road to reading for themselves. Jim Trealease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, recommends reading aloud to your children at a level a little beyond what they can read for themselves, until they are in sixth grade or even older. When they've heard a new word as you read aloud, they are able to understand its meaning from context and recognize it when they meet it in their own reading. By reading with you, they develop the attention span and the appetite for longer and more complicated stories.
What books work best
At the very beginning, it doesn't matter what you read. My friend Maria Salvadore, Director of Children's Services for the Washington, D.C. Public Libraries, read her son Nickie the Wall Street Journal from the time he was a few weeks old. She said the Journal was his favorite. He liked the rhythm of the sentences, she says. (I had hopes of getting good stock tips from Nickie when he reached age 4, but he's now moved on to Where the Wild Things Are and won't discuss his financial expertise at all.)
In the pre-school years, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, poems and picture books work best.
My book The Stories Julian Tells is good to introduce to children at about age 5; More Stories Julian Tells is good for age 6; and my other titles work well with children from 7 to 10. The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods is a book girls 10 to 13 enjoy. It describes the 'secrets' of pre-teen and early teen feeling and relating; and girls would probably want to read on their own.
Talking about books
When you read a story to young children, pause to ask them questions about the illustrations and the narrative. Rather than asking questions with yes and no answers, ask open-ended questions, such as, "What are Julian and Huey doing?" or "Why did they taste the pudding?" Expand on children's answers, suggest alternative possibilities, and pose progressively more challenging questions.
In Beginning to Read, Marilyn Jaeger Adams describes the powerful effects of parental questions during read-aloud sessions. In one study, two- to three-year-old children of parents who followed this read-aloud strategy for one month were tested against a control group of children who over a month's time had simply heard stories read straight through. At the end of the month, the children of the questioning parents were eight-and-one-half months ahead of the others on a test of verbal expression and six months ahead on a vocabulary test! Quite a dramatic difference in children who were only 30 months old. But viewing read-aloud sessions as a sharing of questions and ideas is the goal--not creating an inquisition.
In my stories for readers 5 and up, children often get into trouble, and then find ways to make their situation good again.
For instance in "The Pudding Like a Night on the Sea," from The Stories Julian Tells, the boys give way to the temptation to eat a pudding their father has made for their mother. Instead of punishing them, their father has them make a new pudding.
At the beginning of the story "I Learn Firefighting" in More Stories Julian Tells, Julian tells the reader: "I would like to be like Smokey the Bear. I would like to be the person who sees the little spark that starts trouble and puts it out, like a forest fire, right at the beginning."
At the end of the story, in which Julian impulsively teases his little brother, his father tells him "Huey needed a smart older brother like me, not just parents, to take care of him. And he said that sometimes it would be hard, but when I am older I will be proud of myself because I helped Huey to grow up and took good care of him."
This is a theme that might elicit a lot of discussion about how children treat their own little brothers and sisters, and about how to avoid conflicts.
Reading my books with your child
All my books, besides being exciting stories that are often funny, provide openings for discussions with children of how things are in their own families--what children are proud of, what they are sorry about, and what they wish their parents and siblings would do differently.
The children in the Julian, Huey and Gloria stories are African-American, but they are also "Every-Child." The things that happen to them happen to all children. Because the children aren't victims of racism or violence, the stories provide a picture of the way the world ought to be. It's very important for young readers to learn that the world can be a stable place, where children achieve goals and encounter love and justice. Stories like mine make hope possible for them.
Hope derived from reading is especially important for children whose outer world is turbulent. Middle-class children enjoy my books, but so do those who come from disturbed homes. One, a white sixth-grader in a shelter for abused children, told me my Julian books were her very favorites and that she read them over and over.
If you have ideas that you would like to share, write to me by clicking here and I'll add them to this page.
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Copyright © 2000 Ann Cameron