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SocietyJuly 11, 2024

Help Me Hera: How do I raise my kid to be a reader?

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Is it selfish to want your children to love the same things as you?

Want Hera’s help? Email your problem to helpme@thespinoff.co.nz

Dear Hera,

As a kid, I was a voracious reader. I spent all my spare time reading anything and everything I could get my hands on. I have a few nieces who are about to be teenagers soon, and even though I’ve given them heaps of books over the years, neither of them have expressed much of an interest in reading. Which is fine! They are both beautiful and interesting people with their own weird hobbies and passions (worm farms and surfing 😂). But I can’t help feeling like they’re missing out on something!  

My partner and I are having our first baby this year and we couldn’t be more excited. We’ve always talked about having a big family. Maybe it’s selfish to want your kids to love the same things as you. But I really, really want my kids to be readers. I want to share the books I loved with them, and have them love them too. But do kids even like books anymore? Am I just trying to foist my own hobbies on them? And how do I compete against the tyrant Bluey? 

A line of dark blue card suit symbols – hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades

Dear,

First of all, congratulations on your baby! 

It’s very wise and philosophical of you to acknowledge that your future children are people with their own personalities and interests. But if it’s selfish to want kids to love to read, then call me Ulf Mark Schneider, CEO of Nestlé.

There’s been a lot of panic about kids’ literacy rates in the news recently, and I don’t know what to think about it. But trying to solve the problem through rigorous standards-based assessment, while funnelling the education budget to charter schools doesn’t exactly seem like a visionary approach. Forgive me for being sentimental, but books are more than just structured literacy units for maximising phonic comprehension. Books open the door to children’s linguistic and imaginative potential. A good book can make you feel at home in the world. 

The evidence proves, again and again, that the best way to teach children to read, is to get them to love books. And the best way to get kids to love books, is to read to them. Every night, if possible. Even after they’ve learned to read, and no longer need your help. Even when they have a mortgage and a family of their own, and are working in a small rural vet practice. Make it a special routine you look forward to at the end of every day. 

If you don’t know how to read aloud to kids, don’t worry. Children are good teachers. They will let you know when they’re bored. For babies, stick to short books with noises and flaps and rhyme. (The Noisy Book by Soledad Bravi.) As they get older, it’s fun to pick something with lots of potential for interaction, or a great rhyme. Do you see where the mouse has hidden his toothbrush? Can you see the monkey in the apron? What noise does a crocodile make? (Would You Rather by John Burningham. Dazzlehands by Josh Morgan and Sacha Cotter.)

If you’re planning on having a baby shower and don’t want a thousand Scandinavian bamboo onesies or infant scalp massagers, you could ask people to bring a picture book they loved as a gift. Books are relatively inexpensive and last forever.

As your kid or kids get older, let them choose their own books. That doesn’t mean you can’t pick a few of your old favourites to read. But it should be a shared activity. Make a habit of going to the library and letting your kid borrow whatever they feel like, even if you suspect Michael Caine’s autobiography is too advanced. Make it a special outing. Take them to feed the ducks on the way home. Take turns reading to the ducks.

Don’t stop reading to your kids when they learn to read. Kids get turned away from books when books stop feeling like an escape, and begin to feel like homework. Keep up the nightly storytimes. If you want to work on their reading skills and comprehension, find another time – 10 minutes after school, say, where you read a book together. Ask them words you know they already know. Take turns reading the Elephant and Piggie books in different voices. Turn on the television subtitles (apparently). Let them read graphic novels and comics. The speech bubbles provide good clues and context for new words. 

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Ignore recommended reading ages. Never tell them something is too young or too old. If your seven-year-old wants to read Where the Wild Things are, let them! I’ve seen so many grandparents come to the bookshop, and try and talk their beloved grandchild out of buying the latest Captain Underpants in favour of Wild Fang. If you want them to love Wild Fang, you better read it to them yourself, and howl at appropriate intervals. Only being able to read developmentally appropriate books is boring. If your child is having nightmares about plane crashes, it makes sense to keep Hatchet by Gary Paulsen on a high shelf. But any book that gets a child interested in reading is a good book, even if that book is ‘Terrible Tales of Medieval Torture’ or ‘Even MORE Facts About Hammerhead Sharks!’ 

Going on a long car trip? Get an audiobook and listen to it together. Let your kid have extended bedtimes if they are reading. Pretend not to notice. Let your children see you read, and that reading is not just for children. 

And talk to a bookseller or librarian! The best part of the job is trying to find a book for a fussy child, with a fervent passion for scarecrows or ladybirds. Or even the “tyrant Bluey”. 

There’s a beautiful and entertaining book by Daniel Pennac called Rights of the Reader, which might be of interest to you. But as long as you’re introducing your kid to a steady diet of books, and having a nice time together, you have nothing to worry about. 

I also don’t think you shouldn’t give up on your almost-teenage nieces yet! The transition from children’s fiction to the YA section can be startling. But there must be some good books about worm farming and surfing out there. Please leave any suggestions in the comments below. Sometimes all it takes is the right book at the right time.

Keep going!
The Employment Court has ordered the University of Auckland to pay Siouxsie Wiles $20,000 in damages
The Employment Court has ordered the University of Auckland to pay Siouxsie Wiles $20,000 in damages

OPINIONSocietyJuly 10, 2024

The Siouxsie Wiles judgment should be a wake-up call for New Zealand’s universities

The Employment Court has ordered the University of Auckland to pay Siouxsie Wiles $20,000 in damages
The Employment Court has ordered the University of Auckland to pay Siouxsie Wiles $20,000 in damages

The University of Auckland has been ordered to pay the scientist $20,000 in damages for breaching her employment contract. Her original co-complainant Shaun Hendy says the outcome should prompt some serious soul-searching.

At the heart of Wiles v the University of Auckland – a case heard by the Employment Court in Auckland in November last year – was the extent to which a university is obligated to manage the risks arising from harassment of its academic staff who engage in public commentary. 

Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles, one of New Zealand’s most celebrated and indefatigable Covid-19 commentators, was subject to sustained and distressing harassment, both online and in person, during the pandemic. When she turned to the university for help, she was told that her commentary did not fall within her duties as an academic. Rather than supporting her, the university told her she might have to stop. 

Unsatisfied, Wiles filed a personal grievance in August 2021, and after a two-year marathon, was finally able to bring the university before the Employment Court late last year. The court’s judgment, released earlier this week, upholds Wiles’s grievance and makes other important findings in her favour.

Most crucially, the court found that Wiles’s commentary was, in fact, part of her job. This means that her employer had obligations to protect her under New Zealand’s health and safety legislation. Indeed, the court found that the university had failed in those obligations to Wiles and, in the process, had not fulfilled a host of other responsibilities as her employer. 

The judgment should be a wake-up call for New Zealand’s universities. Wiles’s courageous stance, in taking on New Zealand’s largest university, has left academic freedom in a much stronger position, and for this she will be much admired. The fact that she had to take her university all the way to the Employment Court to force it to take her concerns seriously, on the other hand, should trigger some serious soul-searching in the tertiary sector.  

Wiles was successful on several other matters. The judgment sheds light on the university’s victim-blaming, where it seemed to suggest she was bringing the abuse on herself. This was reflected in the stance of some university senior managers, one of whom the judge described as having views that “were affected by Associate Professor Wiles’s popularity.”  

For me, this is the saddest part of what was a thoroughly shameful saga: that the university was effectively blaming Wiles for her predicament. At the same time as it was was using Wiles’s profile to promote itself publicly, senior university managers were undermining her behind the scenes. The idea that most of the abuse Wiles was receiving arose from her “activities on social media” rather than her work was a “view that seemed to permeate the university’s approach”, the judge noted, compounding what she charitably called a “problematic response”.

An all-staff email sent by the vice chancellor on Monday after the judgment was made public attempted to frame it as a win for the university. The email left staff none the wiser about the university’s breaches of health and safety and employment law, nor that the university had spent more than $1.2 million in legal fees defending these breaches. I can only conclude that the university remains very much in denial. It can add as many new processes and procedures as it likes, but if it can’t fix the cultural problems that dogged its management’s response, its efforts are just window-dressing. 

The vice chancellor’s spin should not detract from the importance of this ruling for the wider tertiary sector. In New Zealand, universities have obligations to preserve and enhance academic freedom, which includes “the freedom of academic staff and students, within the law, to question and test received wisdom, to put forward new ideas, and to state controversial or unpopular opinions”. The Education Act also says universities have a responsibility to disseminate knowledge and to promote community learning and must accept a role as “critic and conscience” of society. 

One of the ways universities meet these obligations is to allow their academics to use their expertise to engage in public commentary. By finding that such commentary falls within Wiles’s scope of employment, something that the University of Auckland was at times reluctant to accept, the judgment substantially strengthens the position of academics who are prepared to take on the role of “critic and conscience of society”.

Dr Siouxsie Wiles helped us beat a virus. She has just stared down a billion-dollar organisation that had lost its way. I have no idea what challenge she will take on next. What I do know is that we must now make the most of the freedom she has fought for. New Zealand’s academy owes her that. 

Disclaimer: Shaun Hendy was a co-complainant with Wiles to the Employment Relations Authority, although he settled the matter with the University of Auckland when he left in 2022. Wiles remains a close personal friend. 

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