Promoting reading 1
Chapter 4. Reading role models Who are children’s
reading role models? That children and adults learn by imitating others is well known. The use of reading role models in reading promotion activities seems intuitively reasonable. A role model can be a person whose behaviour you imitate, but also someone whose values and ideas you share. There are a number of examples of reading promotion programmes and projects targeting children and adolescents in their free time that use role models adapted to specific target groups. Who, then, are the most important role models for reading? The most important form of influence on children’s reading during their first few years of life is parents reading to their children and parents reading themselves. In fact, a child learns to speak and communicate long before he or she starts school by imitating significant adults in their environment. That parents are important role models for a child’s reading may seem obvious. Early reading habits, like most habits, are an imitation of adult behaviour. If parents find reading positive and meaningful, their child will likely follow them in this. Textbooks as well as research studies and student theses that treat the parent’s role as a role model for reading often stress the importance of parents having an interest in reading first and foremost (see for example Nilsson 1986, Brink 2000, West & Knochenhauer 2006). Consequently, reading promotion for children and adults cannot easily be regarded as two separate areas. Many studies have examined how parents’ reading habits in their free time influence their children’s reading behaviour. Wollscheid (2014) based a study on 757 children aged 10–19 years. According to its results, both parents have the biggest impact on the reading behaviour of their daughters. However, the study also lends support to what is termed the gender-stereotype hypothesis, according to which fathers have a greater impact on the reading behaviour of sons, and mothers on daughters. The study also reported that the reading behaviour of mothers had a stronger impact on younger children’s reading socialisation, while the reading behaviour of fathers appears to have a stronger impact on older children. According to a small study in Sweden based on around 300 telephone interviews with boys and young men aged between 13 and 25 years, peers, parents and other adults in their environment were the most important role models for them for reading. According to the interviewees, parents and peers are more important as potential reading role models than celebrities (Redman 2013). A larger British study based on interviews with almost two thousand children and adolescents aged 7 to 15 years produced a similar result. According to this study, the family, followed by peers and teachers, are the most important reading role models (Clark, Osborne & Dugdale 2009). The majority of the interviewees named someone from their closest family circle as a role model, mostly one of the child’s parents. The family is the most important role model for both boys and girls. Outside the child’s immediate social environment, role models come from 50