This week: Children's Literature and Literacy Edited by: Max Griffin đłď¸âđ  
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| I write for adults. I know only one thing about writing for children: that it's important. You can't function in the modern world without good reading skills. Reading research shows that in order to acquire those skills, you need to have things read to you and to practice by reading stuff on your own. For children, that means there need to be entertaining books adults can read to them and books that they want to read on their own. Authors of children's literature provide those books. Literacy rates in the US have been falling for over twenty years, making the need for these books even more urgent. |
As authors, we write stuff. If youâre like me, you hope people will read the stuff you write. That means you have a concept of who is reading the stuff you write and how they read it. In particular, I think that my readers are at least young adults, and that reading the stuff I write is a solitary activity. I donât see people sitting around in a group while someone reads my stuff to them. No one does that, right?
In point of fact, there is one kind of written stuff where thatâs exactly what happens: childrenâs literature. The audience for this kind of literature includes preschoolers and beginning readers. Itâs been a long time since I was in third grade, but I remember every day included a story time where the teacher read to us. I also remember we read to each other, as early as first grade.
Why reading to children and writing for them are important
For preschoolers and beginning readers, being read to is a particularly important experience. In fact, itâs never too soon to start reading to your child. Research shows that reading to infants has many positive benefits, including improved language skills, bonding, emotional learning, and success later in school. Itâs at least partly through story-time that infants acquire the phonemes and rhythms of language, and start to make connections between the sound of language and its emotional content. Itâs been over seventy years, but I still remember reading about the three little kittens to my infant daughter, and her delight at the story even when she was four or five.
Story time, whether at home or in school, is also of great importance in childrenâs ability to acquire the ability to read. I canât remember a specific time when I couldnât read, but I do remember wanting to be able to read. In particular, I wanted to read my older brotherâs Scrooge McDuck comic books, and I remember my fascination with the adventures of his nephews, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. They were at least a part of my motivation to learn to read, and provided incentive to continue reading. They werenât exactly âliterature,â but their adventures often had myths and folk tales as elements, explored ideas of right and wrong, and had both character arcs and plots.
Writing for children is different from writing for adults. Writing a book like Goodnight Moon involves as complex a set of skills as writing, say, Brokeback Mountain. They are different skills, of course, but they are at least as complex.
The point is that stories written for children are important. Those stories are fundamental part of how children learn to read.
How do children learn to read?
So, how do children learn to read? This turns out to have a controversial history. Prior to the 1980s, phonics ruled the roost, but that started to change as parents revolted. English is peculiar, and has zillions of illogical exceptions. Why is circle not spelled serkle? Why isnât silhouette pronounced âsillhooteâ, or least spelled âsillowet?â Or maybe it would be âsilowet,â but I guess the latter would be pronounced âsigh-low-wet.â Anyway, I always gnu there must be some reason, but what I new and what you knew are often too different things. You get the idea: there are limits to phonics and sounding out words. Context and spelling rules are also important.
For or a while back in the 80s, phonics all but disappeared and something called âwhole languageâ took over. This meant using context, sentence structure, and sound cues to figure out unfamiliar words, a technique called âthree-cueing.â The idea of sounding out a word with phonics largely disappeared in many schools.
So, how did that turn out? Well, the data were clear. Literacy scores dropped throughout the eighties and nineties. The evidence showed that abandoning phonics was a mistake. Today, most children learn to read first with phonics, supplemented with context-based skills. Many states now ban or limit three-cueing in the early grades.
Literacy Rates
So, with those reforms, literacy scores have recovered, right?
Wrong.
Literacy scores initially did recover, not to 1980 levels but at least to the lower 1970 levels. But then, in the current century, they began to decline in every annual assessment. In 2012, 14% of 16-24 year-olds were functionally illiterate. By 2023, that number increased to 25%. In the overall population, the trend is similar. In 2012, 18% of the US population was functionally illiterate, while that number was 28% in 2023, the last year in which statistics are available.
In case you were thinking COVID might be contributing this, the data show a steady decrease in literacy in the US with no spikes during or after the COVID years. Something else is driving this.
Itâs also apparently a uniquely US phenomenon. For example, US literacy rates used to be similar to those of those in Canada or Europe, but thatâs no longer the case. In Canada and the UK, for example, the literacy rates have held more or less steady at the levels of 2012, while in the US they have dropped steadily.
Itâs alarming to think about what these numbers mean. Over one in four US adults cannot do the following tasks:
 They cannot read at the third-grade level;
They cannot read and understand simple product manuals.
They cannot find a location on a street map.
They cannot follow simple instructions how to do a task
The other three in four in the US are âfunctionally literate,â but thatâs a relatively low bar and focuses on things you need to accomplish basic, day-to-day tasks. "Functional literacy" specifically does not include the ability to do higher-order inferential tasks, including, for example,
The ability to read at the eighth-grade level;
The ability to read and understand an encyclopedia article on the US Bill of Rights; or
The ability consult a reference to determine which foods contain a particular vitamin; or
Read a complex novel like Harry Potter; or
compare viewpoints in two editorials; or
make the connection between claims and evidence in a written argument.
Only about half the US adult population have these higher-level skills.
Thereâs a separate standard measure of numeracy, the ability to read and understand quantitative information. As with verbal literacy, the US rates numeracy have shown substantial drops in the twenty-first century, a drop that has not been mirrored in Europe or Canada.
Conclusion
The point of all these statistics is to highlight the critical importance of writing for children. The three-cuers werenât entirely wrong: context is important and phonics is only a start. We also must have written materials to read to children and that children want to read themselves. Learning to read is difficult. Children need an incentive to acquire the skill, and childrenâs literature is one of the primary incentives available.
Back when I was VP for academics at my local campus, I was especially proud of our program in early childhood educationâthatâs birth to about age 8, in case you were wondering. We also had a medical school on campus. One group of early childhood students learned that many of the parents using the pediatrics clinic had never been read to as children and didnât know how to read to their own children. These students started a project in which they took turns reading to children in the waiting room of the pediatrics clinic. This not only benefited the children, it also benefited the parents by modelling the behavior of reading to a child. A local philanthropist learned of this, and donated funds so that the waiting rooms now have books that the parents can take homeâfor free!--and read to their children.
Projects like this are one way to break the cycle of illiteracy and, with it, the cycle of poverty. But for any project like this to succeed, we need more and better books for preschoolers and early readers. We need picture books, certainly better ones than the Scrooge McDuck comic books that motivated me. These are literature, important and vital literature. Arguably, this literature is more important than the latest Pulitzer Prize winners, or even the Nobel Prize winners.
Childrenâs literature literally can change the world.
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For Authors: November 19, 2025 Issue [#13453]
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