KATE EMERY: Faffing about with Book Week costumes is worth the pay-off of getting kids excited to read

Parents have lots of reasons to complain.

Book Week is not one of them.

By all means bemoan the fact that parenthood starts with one person pushing a bowling ball out of their bathing suit area or that bedtime is proof of what Albert Einstein suggested in his theory of relativity: the existence of a new time dimension where everything slows to a crawl.

Just don’t whinge about the existence of an annual celebration of books, stories and reading — especially not when our kids are facing a reading crisis.

But the costumes!

No.

But it’s just another burden on working parents!

No.

But my kid wants to go as Elsa from Frozen every year and every year I cave in and have to explain to judgmental parents and teachers that, actually, there are a number of Frozen book spin-offs so technically the costume is fine.

No (but I feel your pain).

In a school year crammed with marathon assemblies, ill-timed parental morning teas and school bags overflowing with drawings and craft projects that must be discreetly disposed of under cover of darkness, Book Week is one “burden” that should be welcomed every year.

This isn’t because I particularly enjoy trying to convince my six-year-old that those op-shop pants, when teamed with this ladies green jacket, absolutely makes her look like Wolf Girl and not a member of the Artful Dodger’s street gang with access to a Witchery chain.

It’s because Book Week is designed to get kids excited about books in a world that is increasingly geared towards dopamine-spiking screens and 20 second videos to cater for the modern attention span.

Is that not worth a bit of faff with the tin of orange hairspray required to turn my eight-year-old into the Flame Princess from the Adventure Time graphic novels?

Book Week can be as hard or half-arsed as you care to make it. Is your time really so precious that you can’t afford to get up five minutes early to draw a zig-zag scar on your kid’s forehead and call it a day?

This year marks 80 years of Book Week, which is the work of the Children’s Book Council of Australia. The CBCA’s mission statement, when it was established in 1945 was partly about promoting Australian stories, at a time when most Aussie kids grew up reading about white Christmases, English boarding schools and trying to figure out what the heck spotted dick was anyway, and partly about encouraging a love of reading.

Raising a kid who loves to read isn’t just good for them academically, although kids who read regularly not only perform better in reading tests but in general intelligence tests. One study suggested that children who read daily improve their school marks as much as though they had studied for an extra three months.

Reading is also shown to improve kids’ social skills, empathy, mental health and happiness. It’s also just fun.

The statistics on kids reading for pleasure are bleaker than the plot of Wolf Girl (if you know, you know). Between 2018 and 2022 the percentage of Australian kids reading books for fun fell from 79 per cent to 72 per cent (71 per cent in WA).

This should be no surprise to anyone, given screens’ colonisation of childhood.

A still-forming brain, faced with the choice between brightly-coloured moving images on a screen that promises no-effort entertainment and words on a page they have to read that might not get good until Lucy finally gets through that wardrobe doesn’t have much of a choice.

Turning kids into readers isn’t just the responsibility of schools — parents need to do more.

I’ve banged this drum before but it’s a tune that bears repeating: if your kid isn’t reading for pleasure it’s probably your fault. Let your kid see you reading books for fun, take them to the library or bookshop and let them choose what they like and limit their access to screens.

And when your child comes home and tells you they need a Book Week costume, instead of putting another pin in the voodoo doll of your school principal, feign some excitement, invest in a hot glue gun and try to smile.