READING WITH MOTHER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 786, 13 August 1954, Page 12

READING WITH MOTHER

BOOKS BEFORE FIVE, by Dorothy White; New Zealand Council for Educational Research. 12/6.

(Reviewed by

N.

M.

that Mother reads. They are, to be sure, not always read in the most favourable cifcumstances: Mother Goose may be pushed urgently between the iron and the itoning-board, or The Gingerbread Man pefched on the kitchen behch between the cook-book and the mixing-bowl. They are books for all hours-books befofté five quite often méans (at least in summer time) books before 5.0 a.m. Yet whether Mother teads them with che eye on the dinnef, or with both eyes half-closed, they are the infant’s first introduction to a wotld of Wonder aiid delight, and as neéessary to his healthy development as vegetables and vitamins. But it is a lot easier for mothers to leatn abeut vegetables and vitamins than about children’s books, and it is cothmoner to find a facile agreement about what children should be preverted from reading than sound advice on how to develop and encourage reading of the right kind. Before Five are books

For eight years Dorothy White has been one of the few accéssible guides: in this field, and easily the best of them. In 1946 she wrote About Books for Chil-

dren, a survey. of children’s literature which provided not only a whole library of titles for harassed parents to draw on. but sound standards on which they might judge the quality of whatever children’s books came their way. Books Betoré Five might be assumed, from its title, to be a full-length treatment of the Picture Book chapter in the earlier work. In one sense it is, but the angle of approach is so different that it is vastly more engrossing than a mere te-working of such material could be. Mrs. White’s first book was the fruit of her training as a librarian, and in particulat of a notable term as children’s librarian in Dunedin. It was the book of an expert, and though it embodied much shrewd observation of children, it was detached and objective. Books Befote Five comes from a new environment. Though the trained and atticulate observer is still readily discernible, Mrs. White appears here as a mother making her own report on experience: Shortly after my daughter’s second bifthday, I began to make some rough notes about the. books that I read to her, notes which grew gradually into ‘this reading diary, a mixture of her views afid mine about the picture books we shared. The words "we shared" ate worth emphasising. Inevitably there is more in this diary than a record of books read. Mr. H. C. D. Somerset (in a scholarly foreword which is at the same time an expert appraisal of the book) points out that "a child is growing up in its pages and the varied pattern of her

social, emotional and intellectual development gradually unfolds as the weeks and months pass." Since he i8 writing as a teacher, and in part for teachers, Mr. Somerset's attention is concentrated on the child. I don’t think many mothers will probe as deeply as he does-or even as deeply as he would like them to do-but most of them will recognise that Books Before Five is important as the study, riot of a™ child alone, but of a mother and child. The book is good in a number of ways. I found it delightful simply to read, while Mrs. White’s comments make it at the same time stimulating and profitable. Reading mothers, particularly those who use their libraries, will enjoy it because it maps familiar ground, and find reassurance and encouragement in it from the emphasis it places upon an activity whose importancé they may have recognised but not fully understood. pm Books Before Five is, in a festricted sense at least, the complement of About Books for Children, I don’t suggest that it cannot stand on its own, but mothers who have fread and used the earlier book will gain most pleasure and profit from its sticcessor.