Why shared reading matters for children from vulnerable family backgrounds

In a speech to the Social Work Show in Manchester, Patrice Lawrence , Writer-in-Residence at BookTrust, talked about the importance of shared reading for children. She said that reading can give children a way of talking about their own lives -- but only if they see people and stories like themselves reflected in literature.

And yet she said that the first survey of ethnic representation in children’s literature showed only four per cent of children’s books published that year featured black, Asian or minority ethnic characters.*

As a child, the books Patrice Lawrence read and loved reflected little of her own life.

‘I did not live with my birth family. My parents were both training to be psychiatric nurses and my Dad did not want to be a Dad so he left Mum.’

For four years, Patrice was privately fostered. ‘I was always asking why, why, so my foster mother bought me an encyclopaedia.’

‘When I was four, Mum married Angelo, who was Italian and always introduced me as his daughter. We lived in Hastings, in a cul-de-sac where everyone else was white. I was aware that our house was a bit different.’

Her mother was brought up in colonial Trinidad and loved children's classics. ‘She gave them to me to read so we could talk about them.’ Her own favourites included The Wind in the Willows and Little Women. ‘Little Women was about a single parent family and Jo who wanted to be a writer.’

The Diddakoi by Rumer Godden was important. ‘It was about a girl from a traveller family, and about racism. She goes to school and gets bullied…You learn very early not to talk about these things generally. You don’t know how to talk about it. But books give you shared reading and you get to talk.’

‘I wrote stories for my two younger brothers but I didn’t think I mattered. I didn’t think my family mattered.’

‘It’s all about stereotypes that we hold in us. They stay with you….I did not write about a character of colour until I was into my 30s.

‘The book that changed me was Pig-heart Boy by Malorie Blackman and oh my days,
What About Me by Helen Stephen – they were reflecting reality.’

Her first book for young adults was Orangeboy, which won awards for its depiction of a teenage boy swept up in events he cannot control. This was followed by Indigo Donut

‘I wrote it at a time when children in foster care had to be out of care at seventeen and a half. I wanted to write a book that talked about how it felt when every bond was to be broken.

‘I wrote Rat because I wanted to write about child whose parent is in prison.’ In the book, the boy’s mother is caught stealing food when her Universal Credit does not come through, and the boy is sent to live with his grandparent. ‘It is about anger, and a community coming together.’

‘As an author you can give a voice and a face to children that are demonised and marginalised.

Needle, written after Child Q was taken out of an exam and stripped searched ‘is about how black girls are treated as adults.’

She commented, ‘Never cross a writer because you will appear in a book.’

Ms Lawrence said that many more books are needed to reflect the different lives children live. Her strategies for change include:
-- Building the research base - children absorb values from an early age
-- Strengthening the evidence base on how representation in books impacts on children
-- Championing books as tools to empathise, build bonds and bring joy.