racism
...d the book, read it now, if you have read it yourself as a child, read it again. Read it immediately after your child; not oly will you be familiarising yourself with the material she is reading, you will be showing an interest in her reading. Having identified the key points which you wish to address ( be selective, two or three ideas per book is quite adequate, any more threatens to turn the opening of a book into a threat of a lecture) discuss the book with your child, get her to express her opinion, offer yours : ask her what she thought of the things which you identified as being sexist. The most important idea for the young reader to develop is that writers are not infallible, everything which they put in print need not be taken as absolute truth, and the most important way to develop this concept is through discussion. Selecting non sexist material ( and even being able to identify issues of sexism within the books children are reading ) requires some guidelines to what might be considered sexist or non-sexist. For example, consider, does the book being assessed assign important roles in terms of the action to male characters? does the book show a statistically unrealistic balance of male characters to female (remembering that women make up slightly more than half of the human race)? does the book present stereotypes of gender behaviour in such a way as to suggest that these are appropriate or accurate? does the book emphasise female passivity/male activity? does the book make gender based assumptions of the reader? does the book actively challenge the above roles and assumptions? does the book, in fact, develop exciting and challenging possibilities for it's female characters and offer it's male characters the opportunity to be sensitive to others? The answers to these questions are readily apparent, provided you take the opportunity to read the book in question. But obviously, in the search for non-sexist reading material of a high standard, you can not be expected to read everything. Much of the identification of such material is dependent on word of mouth; read, share what you have discovered with other interested parents; most major centres have a Women's Bookshop which will be able to offer advice. As a good starting point, Margaret Mahy provides some very broad challenges to acceptable gender roles for a wide range of reading ages. Joan Aiken's fantasy/history books are also strong in dynamic female leads. But both these writers also carry small inconsistencies in their work, as do (amongst my favourites) Diana Wynn Jones, Patricia Wrightson and Helen Cresswell. Excellent books for older readers have been published by Virago, under the imprint Virago Upstarts; picture books by Sandra Boynton, Joy Cowley and Patricia Grace are always good value; Ni...