Welcome to Friday Footnotes, a weekly newsletter from me,
(founder of Storygram). It’s even got pictures 🙌Each week I touch on reading, parenting, motivation, children’s books, education, writers, and whatever else catches my attention. Please reply with your thoughts, and share at will!
This week’s footnotes 🧐
Here are three footnotes from this week. Leave a comment with your take!
1. Storygram Labs is now Storygram Parents
You may have noticed something slightly different about this week’s newsletter. Answers in the comments!
It’s taken almost a year of writing and thinking for this to dawn on me, but I’ve realised that I specifically want to help parents raise children who love reading. I’m convinced enough of the benefits, and horrified enough at the demise in reading enjoyment, to want to do something about it. I’m convinced this will be worth my blood, sweat, and tears!
Somehow, clarity about who my audience is has made me feel more excited (and productive) than I have been since at the start of this journey.
2. Raising long-form thinkers in a short-form world
A hundred years ago, only elites had access to the variety and quantity of food that we take for granted today. Night or day, I can unthinkingly eat a selection of food that medieval kings might have gone to war over.
Similarly, the smorgasbord — the absolute glut — of online information is something that early academics and monks alike could have only dreamt of.
But if you’ve ever eaten until falling into a sofa-coma (or worse), you’ll know that abundance can have a price.
An abundance of information inevitably leads us to consume information in smaller and smaller chunks, as evidenced by the rapid rise of YouTube videos, then Instagram Reels, then TikTok. Our minds can’t appreciate their limits, and just as children (and occasionally adults) eat until they are sick, we gorge online until our minds become sick.
For entertainment purposes, shorter formats, at best, are just less fulfilling.
But with certain content such as news or politics, short-form content is dangerous: it lacks nuance, context, and care. The algorithm feeds that which enrages. We all know where that path leads: the divisive world we find ourselves in.
In a short-form world, there is no time for nuance. Even with good friends, it is challenging to discuss certain topics without a serious amount of careful worldview unpacking. Who has the humility and open-mindedness, or even the time and patience for that?
This, as much as anything, is one of the foundational reasons that children must read books. Books are, perhaps, the ultimate long-form content. They require measured consumption. They encourage consideration of context, multiple storyline threads, and do not often allow a simplistic narrative of absolute right and wrong. They illustrate the complexity of the world.
I believe that children who read books are more disposed towards interrogating both sides, towards empathy, and to drawing conclusions only after careful consideration. The world is going to need men and women who display these characteristics more than ever in the days to come.
3. How do you talk to your kids about books?
I hear you: lighten up, dude!
Okay then: how do you talk to your children about books? Do you discuss what they are reading with them?
There are two stages of engaging with kids about books that I’m particularly interested in:
Discovery: understanding their personal interests to aid finding books that will appeal to them.
Commentary: having regular ongoing conversations about whatever they are reading - helping them to know their own mind and conclusions.
There’s a lot that goes on in the mind of a child, but sometimes it might need teasing out (sometimes it comes tumbling out unlooked for!)
Both discovery and commentary can be illuminating for parents trying to figure out what appeals to their kids. And, given time, you get to learn what they think about all sorts of things. But there are more or less beneficial ways to get the conversation going - and we need to be careful not to give them the impression that there is a ‘correct’ answer, or else they will only give the answers they think we want to hear.
How do you do it?
What are you reading? 🤓
This week, I’d love to hear what you are reading right now. No judgment! (Well, not too much). I’ve started a chat on Substack, so please let me know:
Quote of the week
There is something in the very form of reading – the shape of the action itself – that tends toward virtue. The attentiveness necessary for deep reading (the kind of reading we practice in reading literary works as opposed to skimming news stories or reading instructions) requires patience. The skills of interpretation and evaluation require prudence. Even the simple decision to set aside time to read in a world rife with so many other choices competing for our attention requires a kind of temperance.
—
, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great BooksThat’s all for today. Have a wonderful weekend. 😊