I was in Barnes and Noble yesterday and I paused to reflect on a post written by Dr. Al Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Seminary. In his post he wrote;
USA Today editorialized on the new and undeniable gender imbalance on the college and university campus. For every 100 men receiving bachelor’s degrees, women receive 135. That’s a huge disparity, and USA Today describes the statistic as “ominous for every parent with a male child.”
What made me reflect on this?
I wanted to buy a book for my son Will. As I walked around the book store, I notice that there are plenty of options for girls; from the Bobsy Twins to Vampire Romance to Disney Princesses. For the boys—a small shelf of Hardy Boys and Harry Potter was all that was found. This is not Barnes and Noble’s fault—they are in the business of selling books. They don’t market what doesn’t sell.
In regards to marketing, I also began to notice that even the décor of the children’s section is “girly”. Some of this, of course, is because it is Mother’s who typically buy for their children, but is this entirely true?
The feeling I walked away with is that “Boys Don’t Read.” And as Dr. Mohler and USA Today sited—boys also don’t enroll in higher education.
As a parent of a young boy, this is very concerning. I want to make sure that he has every opportunity to read and study and excel academically. Want him to be the man God called him to be.
Thankfully, I can affect that. Through homeschooling—our family can target reading material written for boys and his particular interest. We don’t have to fight the societal shift towards the vision of males as drunk failures, but we can encourage our son to be a leader in a society that will be begging for men to lead.
Pattie says
What about Gary Paulsen? He writes adventure books. Also found this site, obviously you’d want to screen them for appropriate age level stuff: http://www.booksforboys.com/
Suzanne says
We’ve had this problem as well. My 9yr old son started reading voraciously at age 5.5 and there were no age-appropriate books that challenged him and were interesting. I’ve always read anything I can get my hands on, so I can understand his dedication to it, but it’s often difficult to find the right stuff. He’s reading Chronicles of Narnia right now – and loving it. Mostly he has read books on Jet Fighters and Tanks – he loves military stuff… he knew (by memory) almost all the tanks that were at the Military Museum in Baumholder when we were there in 2008 – he was 7…
He enjoyed the Magic Treehouse and Magic Schoolbus sets, but we wanted something more. A friend gave him a book from the Kingdom series for his 8th birthday… he liked them, but hasn’t read the entire set yet.