Age Labels — helpful or hurtful?
photo credit: wili_hybrid
I just loved the comments my post last Wednesday on “Reading at all costs” engendered and thought I would see what folks think about another current controversy raging through the stacks: “Age Banding” books. The idea is to give parents and teachers an idea of what age-group might be ready for a particular book.
From Publisher’s Weekly:
After more than three years of consultation and research, the Publishers Association’s Children’s Book Group in the U.K. has announced that from fall 2008, all new children’s books will carry age guidance. Research among retailers and consumers, children and adults alike, shows that 86% of book buyers backed the idea, with 40% stating that they’d be more likely to buy the books if they carried guidance on age suitability. As a result, the guidance, based on content and divided into 5+, 7+, 9+, 11+ and 13+, will be included on book jackets and covers.
On the other side of the issue, Philip Pullman and a group of writers, librarians, teachers and so on have created the following petition on Notoagebanding.org:
We are writers, illustrators, librarians, teachers, booksellers, publishers, educationalists, psychologists, parents and grandparents. Some of the writers and illustrators have a measure of control over what appears on the covers of their books; others have less.
But we are all agreed that the proposal to put an age-guidance figure on books for children is ill-conceived, damaging to the interests of young readers, and highly unlikely, despite the claims made by those publishers promoting the scheme, to make the slightest difference to sales.
We take this step to disavow publicly any connection with such age-guidance figures, and to state our passionately-held conviction that everything about a book should seek to welcome readers in and not keep them out.
Here are some of our reasons:
- Each child is unique, and so is each book. Accurate judgments about age suitability are impossible, and approximate ones are worse than useless.
- Children easily feel stigmatized, and many will put aside books they might love because of the fear of being called babyish. Other children will feel dismayed that books of their ‘correct’ age-group are too challenging, and will be put off reading even more firmly than before.
- Age-banding seeks to help adults choose books for children, and we’re all in favour of that; but it does so by giving them the wrong information. It’s also likely to encourage over-prescriptive or anxious adults to limit a child’s reading in ways that are unnecessary and even damaging.
- Everything about a book is already rich with clues about the sort of reader it hopes to find – jacket design, typography, cover copy, prose style, illustrations. These are genuine connections with potential readers, because they appeal to individual preference. An age-guidance figure is a false one, because it implies that all children of that age are the same.
- Children are now taught to look closely at book covers for all the information they convey. The hope that they will not notice the age-guidance figure, or think it unimportant, is unfounded.
- Writers take great care not to limit their readership unnecessarily. To tell a story as well and inclusively as possible, and then find someone at the door turning readers away, is contrary to everything we value about books, and reading, and literature itself.
What do you think? Are age labels a good idea or an imposition?
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As a teacher and homeschooler, I’d have to agree with the “No age banding” side of this.
Age is indeed the wrong information to use in helping select books for anyone, and flies in the face of current developmental & educational research. “Ages & Stages” are useful for marketing and management, and very appealing in a lot of ways–but they are not actually a good account of how kids grow and develop. There are better ways to sort things so that books connect with their readers, and the industry needs to find and use them.