A Future Customer

Every other day, it seems, there is a media item about the modern child's adddiction to electronic entertainment. With television, smartphones and tablets on offer they don't have either the concentration or the inclination to read a book. Books, by comparison with the excitements of technology, have allegedly lost their enchantment.

So I was enchanted to find this clip  on YouTube:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/this-little-boy-loves-books-so-much-that-he-cries-when-his-mother-stops-reading-to-him-10483080.html

At least we have one future customer. In fact, more than one. My small grandson, a robust little boy – and we all  know what that means – has even so always been so addicted to stories that his nursery had to make a deal with him that when he had had two he must go and do a different activity before he would be allowed to have another one.

Of course, the effect was to make stories more desirable than ever. Whether it's really the story itself – and in the case of the little boy who cries, it certainly seems to be – or the adult attention and cuddles that go along with the reading, it's hard to say, but there's no doubt that it's the best way to instill in a child the instinct that books are a Good Thing.

I was talking the other day to a first year primary school teacher who works in a school in one of our poorest areas and it was one of the saddest things I've ever heard; there are children coming into her class who don't know their own name, and have to be taught to speak, because their parents have never engaged with them.

Sometimes it's a problem of drink or drugs, sometimes it's just a teenage parent who has no proper experience of mothering herself, but the child will have spent its infancy in front of a TV screen with a dummy in its mouth to keep it quiet.

Recent research shows that success in adulthood can be predicted from the age of two by a child's interest in books.

So I hope the parents of the baby who cries with disappointment when the story is finished keep reading – even though it may seem a long five years before he's able to do it for himself..