Boys, Girls, and the Bookshelf

My son has just left home. He is eight and reads now. Only his eyes move, shuttling across the pages, left to right, left to right, like footsteps into another world. We are no longer his primary information source. We no longer directly control the narrative or sift the flow of mental stimuli. I watch him and can almost hear the hum of his mind, sorting, processing, and archiving information and mental sensation.

For those of us who limit television and media in our homes, books become the influencers, the windows through which our children, straining on their tiptoes, see the great world. What is the literary landscape like in our homes? What do our children read? What should they read?

1. Books that deal in truth, both fiction and non-fiction.

Truth is His name. Every thread of things true—about waterfalls, the speed of light, relationships, the Crusades, our bodies, photosynthesis—if unraveled and teased out, lead to a rope held in His Hands. All things true have deep commonalities. They ring with clarity, vibrate with consistency and rhythm, and radiate signature harmonies. Their minds, being made in the image of His, tune into these frequencies with amazing accuracy and consistency. Set your children up with books to exercise and develop these capacities. Are black panthers a taxonomic reality? What happened to the Roanoke colony? Does a can of Mountain Dew actually have 46 grams of sugar? Populate your home with fact-checking enthusiasts, and provide them with the books they need. Hone their nonsense radars. As their experiences broaden, their truthfinding needs and expertise will exponentially increase, and if you’ve done well—if you’ve enabled and empowered them as truth seekers—you can sleep easy, knowing the end of those who knock and seek.

2. Funny books.

If you must raise a humorless child, do not bring it near me. The laughter of children is an echo of heaven. Not cruel laughter, not mocking or bitter laughter, not the empty brush-fire laughter of fools, but the ice-breaking, heart-warming rollicks of humility and honesty. The easy embrace of our own ludicrousness and of life’s absurdities is an oil easing us across the rocks of life. A healthy relationship with the ridiculous and the bizarre provides good company and real humility. Get them paging, keep them laughing. Lots of funny books is good.

3. Books to grow their world.

Row up books to ignite a growing awareness of what a tiny speck on the map they are. The earth is not the center of the universe, America is not the center of the globe, and neither is conservative Anabaptism the center of Christianity. What is life like for a boy in Mexico City, for the daughter of a Saudi sheik, for a family of Swedish grocers? In a perfect world we could nurture geographical and cultural awareness and humility by seeing for ourselves, but the realities of economy limit us. Books can take your children there.

4. Books offering new and different perspectives.

A developing mind needs an endless slide show of perspectives, especially the perspective empathy offers. When our families see an addict fumbling with his Anything helps sign, contempt and derision often dominate our responses, for we try to imagine the series of choices that would lead us from our large, well-lit homes to selfdestruction under a dumpster in an alley. But if your children have seen in books the inescapable vortex of abuse, the despair and poverty of the drug culture, they will recognize what they see, and the stones will fall from their hands. When the grapevine spins a good tale, be the family who frowns and says, “There’s more to the story.” Be the family with the books telling the rest of the stories. Acquiring books presenting new, true, and varying perspectives helps move us closer to God’s point of view.

5. Books building constructive imagination.

We know the imagination of children is limitless. Give it wheels. Not to escapism or self-centered fantasy but toward the ends of ideals, dreams, and innovation. What if animals talked? If trees had eyes what would they see? Imagine if people were born old and grew younger. What would happen if a pandemic swept the globe that blinded everyone? What if, what if ? Visualizing alternative solutions and outcomes, hypothetical experimentation, far-sighted decision management: all are products of children with vigorous imagination. Have books that exercise this wonderful part of our children’s minds.

6. Books accurately depicting realities.

This is perhaps the most important consideration. Books shape the way our children see the world, and those ways must be in step with what really is. The horrors of war, the enslavements of sin, the powers of love and forgiveness, the vanities of fame and fortunes all must be understood for what they are. One of Christianity’s most enabling functions is the exposure of falsehoods and the illumination of truth, and our children’s books must hew closely to that function. Unfortunately, much of our conservative Anabaptist fiction fails us here. When Father is always gentle, Mother’s voice is always soft, and Deacon Kendall’s reproofs always come from a good place, we have tied literature’s hands, taken away its most powerful function—giving us words for things we experience—and reduced it to indoctrination material. Life is complex and often messy, relationships are complicated, and fathers sometimes parent like a drowning man swims. Our children need books to give them words for when Father is harsh, Mother is shrill, and Deacon Kendall gets it wrong. Books are to help them make sense of what they experience out there, to give them tools to sort out the complexities they live through. Life is gritty, nuanced, and often inexplicable. Make sure your children’s books let them in on it.

What do we strike from our shelves? What books do we burn? Falsehood. Fantasy literature that domesticates dark forces. Content that is overwhelming, that’s too heavy for them at their age. Profanities that tempt young tongues. Elementary school dramas of boy/girl relational content. Paranoid, fear-mongering, un-centered diatribes. Christian material that distorts or dishonestly handles its subject. Any sugar-coated morsels of darkness, sexuality, violence, or decadence. These are not subjects themselves to be purged, for they are around us and in us, but when they are sold as rewarding, gratifying, or amoral they become poison in your home.

Raise readers. Choose well.