Before a boy wizard bounced him from his post, R.L. Stine was once the best-selling children's book author of all time. And while his scary stories reigned supreme in kids' hearts, they sat at number 16 on the American Library Association's most challenged books of the 1990s.
The kids loved him. The parents loved to hate him. To be honest, I've never been a fan. He's been writing teen and child books since the the mid-1980s, so ostensibly I could have picked one up at the library over the years. I don't remember any. I do remember picking up a Goosebumps paperback a few years ago - my Harry Potter obsession serving as a gateway back into childhood literature in my adult years. What struck me wasn't how clever the book was or how I couldn't put it down - I could have left it just as quickly as I'd taken it - but that I finally understood why my little brother always had a tough time getting these back to the library on time. It was right up any preteen boy's alley. Which is exactly what makes people's attempts over the years to have them removed from library shelves such a travesty.
Getting kids to read as they enter the tween years - especially boys - can at times be like pulling teeth. A study funded by Scholastic in 2006 showed 40 percent of kids between the ages of 5 and 8 are "high frequency readers" who read for fun every day. That number drops to 29 percent of kids in the 9 to 11 range and even lower as they get older. Separating the genders, the study found boys are three times more likely than girls to say reading for fun is "not at all important."
Ironically, one mom speaking out in an 1997 CNN story about a parental movement to get Goosebumps pulled from the shelves at her local school admitted her son only read for school reports before he started picking up Stine's novels. "And I had to force him to do that," she said. Excuse the Homer Simpson moment, but . . . DOH!
If you want to encourage kids to read, you let them do it. You give them books or magazines that interest them. They can be reading absolute drivel and still learn vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar. Yes, they're a little scary - which is why they've been challenged over the years. But a generation of boys growing up without books on their shelves is enough to give me nightmares.
Image: Amazon
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