How to Grow a Young Reader:

Chapter One

The Golden Age is Now

The Riches of Childrens Literature Today

It has always seemed clear to me that a good book for children must be a good book in its own right.
—John Rowe Townsend, A Sense of Story

Chapter Two

High-Tech Dragons

The Enemies of Reading

Television captures the imagination but does not free it. A good book at once stimulates and frees the mind.
— Bruno Bettelheim, Parents vs. Television

Chapter Three

Home Front Battle Strategy

Family Reading Possibilities

You may have tangible wealth untold:
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you will never be—
I had a Mother who read to me.
—Stricklin Gillilan

Chapter Four

The Story of Children's Literature

From Mother Goose to Dr. Seuss

Dear, dear! How queer everything is today!
And yesterday things went on just as usual.
I wonder if I've been changed in the night?
—Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Chapter Five

Tried and True Classics

Old Books for Young People

If one man's meat is another man's poison, certainly one man's book may be another man's boredom.
—May Hill Arbuthnot, Children's Books Too Good to Miss

Chapter Six

Fantasy and Science Fiction

Realms of Enchantment

This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual.
—C. S. Lewis, On Stories

Chapter Seven

Realistic Fiction and Biography

Steps in Time

Story-telling, as I see it, is a recreating of life, a breathing of life into plausible characters and of facing honestly every naturally occurring situation those characters meet.
—Ivan Southall, Journal of Discovery: On Writing for Children

Chapter Eight

Family Tales and Folklore

Books that Bridge Generations

We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long gone, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud.
—Russell Baker, Growing Up

To forget ones ancestors is to be a brook without a source, a tree without a root.
—Chinese Proverb

Chapter Nine

The Kids' Hit Parade

Animals, Adventure, Mystery, and Series Books

The freedom to choose ones own books is in some ways the most bracing and dramatic taste of liberty a child can know: At five or six or seven, browsing in the library or bookstore and then reading at home, the child is suddenly free to enter other worlds, spy from within on a thousand lives, leap oceans with a single bound.
—Michelle Landsberg, Reading for the Love of It

Chapter Ten

Words at Play

Poetry and Nonsense

[A poem] may serve as a song (high or low), a mnemonic, squib, satire, advertisement, prayer, picture, noble sermon, Chinese puzzle, childs toy . . . or a balm for simple minds . . . . But the summits of poetry are mysteries.
—Ruth Pitter, Collected Poems

Chapter 11

Nonfiction and Magazines

Satisfying Inquisitive Minds

Curiosity in children is but an appetite for knowledge. One great reason why children abandon themselves wholly to silly pursuits and trifle their time away insipidly is because they find their curiosity balked, and their inquiries neglected.
—John Locke

Chapter 12

The Child's Art Gallery

Picture Books and Illustrations

And what a book it was! . . . so beautiful that Lucy stared at it for a whole minute and forgot about reading it. The paper was crisp and smooth and a nice smell came from it; and in the margins, and round the big coloured capital letters at the beginning of each spell, there were pictures . . . And the longer she read the more wonderful and more real the pictures became.
—C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of The Dawn Treader

Chapter 13

Talking Books and Multimedia Resources

Connecting Technology and Literature

Grandmother dear, what big ears you have! The better to hear you with, my child!
—Little Red Riding Hood, Perrault's Fairy Tales

Chapter 14

Christian Nurture and Values

Food for the Spirit

Remember these commands and cherish them . . . Teach them to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, When you are resting and when you are working.
—Deuteronomy 11:18-19

Chapter 15

Telling Our Stories

The Literature of Daily Living

My story is important not because it is mine . . . but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is yours. Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track . . . of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity . . . that God makes himself known to each of us most powerfully and personally . . . to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but spiritually.
—Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets