November is National Inspirational Role Models Month. Whose posters are on your child’s walls? Whether its sports, music, fashion, or any other subject of special interest to your child, providing books that speak to a personal passion builds on the association of reading with pleasure. It is also a powerful way to affirm your child’s individuality.
Our teenage son Sam has always been Mr. Non-Fiction. When he was very young, he was passionate about trucks. We read everything we could get our hands on in the “truck” genre, from You Can Name 1000 Trucks to I Stink! These days, he’s into humor, baseball, and classic rock. We offer up a lot of baseball and musician memoirs, and point him towards authors like Gary Paulsen, Gerald Durrell, Mike Lupica and Matt Christopher. As long as he’s reading for pleasure, we’re happy.
Our seven year-old daughter Hope is all about fantasy. Her heroes are princesses, fairies, ponies and ballerinas, along with girl rock stars, fashionistas and just plain gutsy girls. (What can I say? No matter how hard we tried to be gender-neutral parents, we ended up with two gender-stereotype kids.) She loves series books, including the Pony Pals, Rainbow Magic and Magic Treehouse series, as well as the Allie Finkle, Just Grace and Clarice Bean books. As long as the protagonist is female!
