“I think it's absolutely crucial that you're read to before you start school.”
This is, perhaps, not a hugely shocking statement to come from the mouth of a children’s author, but for Waterstones Children’s Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce, it is a principle to which he firmly adheres.
“It just gives you an enormous privilege,” he continues. “If your first experience of a book is being cuddled up on the couch with someone who loves you, whoever that is, that is very, very different from your first experience with books being someone plonking one down in front of you in school.
“You arrive at school as a second class citizen if that's what's happened to you.”
Cottrell-Boyce points out that, in England at least, the number of children in this position – those who have never been read to before starting school – is going up. Some of the statistics from a recent report by BookTrust also paint a grim picture, highlighting that while almost all parents say that reading is important, only 40 percent reported having made it part of a normal bedtime routine.
And this, he insists, is a huge problem, one that anyone would be able to understand after watching a child being read to by someone who loves them.
“It's not about the story, right?” he says. “It's about the cuddle. It's about the connection that you're making there. It's about your breathing coordinating. It's about the sharedness of it.
“It's about the child having some kind of agency. If you've ever read to a baby, they'll turn the page back, turn the book upside down, throw the book away. That's a baby becoming a person, you know? These are really, really important stages in our life. And if you're replacing that with screens, say, well life is overwhelming enough if you're a baby. You know, everything is coming at you. I've got a month old grandchild at the moment, but 5 weeks ago he was an aquatic creature.”
Being read to during our early years on the planet isn’t, as far as Cottrell-Boyce is concerned, just a nice experience, or something we’d quite like children to benefit from – it is actually a foundational part of “how you become a human being.”
Some of the ways in which this happens aren’t immediately obvious. He points to the use of rhythm and repetition in books for particularly young children – think about the patterns of stories like The Gruffalo, for example – and suggests that these sorts of patterns help us start to make sense of the world.
“That's why dance is important. That's why song is important. And books are where it starts. There's something really primal happening when you read to your child. And if you replace all that with the screen it's the opposite because everything's coming at you faster and faster and faster. You have less agency, less connection, less emotional support.”
But, he adds, the problem is entirely “fixable”, before turning to an event he had visited just a couple of hours before our meeting in Glasgow city centre.
“Today in Castlemilk I saw an absolutely miraculous environment where books are threaded through everything those kids are doing. There were two woman doing a BookBug event and it’s the best live event I’ve seen this year.
“All the kids were incredibly involved in their own way. Some of them couldn’t sit still, some of them were cuddled up. They were all completed engaged and they’re being given this amazing thing which is so good in so many ways.”
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So if this sort of approach represents a possible solution, what does he think are the main barriers that must be overcome?
“Well poverty is the big one,” he replies.
“I was talking to a teacher in Liverpool and doing the usual 'chattering class' thing about bedtime stories and she said: 'I can tell you that there's five or six kids in my class who don't have beds.' So poverty is the first issue, but there are others, like screens, which perhaps a more middle class problem.”
He returns to his experience in Castlemilk that morning, where the women leading the session turned a ten-page book into an hour experience thanks to the way in which they engaged the children with their storytelling.
The crucial point is that the event, and the process behind it, aren’t about consumption – they’re all about connection.
But if we want that to be happening for all children, and at home, we need to address some complicated and long-standing challenges.
“Some parents have already not been read to. Some parents in their late teens, so they've already grown up in that digital world. So it's a matter of breaking a cycle.”
In these cases, he says that supporting families, and giving them both the knowledge and the confidence they might currently lack, are critical. Part of this, he argues, can be achieved by inviting new parents into sessions like the one he saw in Castlemilk, in the hope that seeing others reading aloud to children, and the different techniques they use as part of that process, will encourage them to try similar activities and approaches at home.
Equally important, however, is taking the support to people in their homes, for example through the network of health visitors, and Cottrell-Boyce again praises Scotland’s universal approach in areas like this, contrasting it with more of a patchwork system south of the border.
And then when young children are in nurseries, he wants to ensure that the adults have had appropriate training, and receive lots of ongoing support:
“I think broadly speaking if your government's offer to children is more childcare to free more adults up for productivity, then the very least that you can do is make sure that those kids in those childcare settings are having a really good experience of books.”
With Christmas fast approaching, Cottrell-Boyce also thinks that giving books as gifts can make a big difference, and send a signal to children not just about the importance of reading, but also the connections it can create.
“Gift giving is such a big part of life and a book is such a simple gift,” he says. “But it’s also a really powerful thing, and it’s such a small ask.
“Why shouldn’t every kid get that chance?”
This Christmas, The Herald is joining forces with Scottish Book Trust to ensure children in need of financial support get the gift of a new book this festive season. Through foodbanks, hospitals, charities and community groups, the Trust will deliver brand new books to families to allow them to share the joy of reading. Please donate at scottishbooktrust.com
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