A Very Hungry Caterpillar costume won’t turn your kid into a bookworm

Book Week rolls around again, and with it comes the predictable chorus of strung-out parents who have no time to read books themselves but are tasked with “inspiring a love of literature” in their kids. How? By dressing them up as characters from children’s books. For an entire week! Why? I’ve been a rabid reader my whole life and have not had to don a Thing 1 or a Thing 2 costume. Not even once, not a single try, not a once in the wide open sky!

Seeing a parent reading is more important than fancy dress. Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

In primary school, I wore colonial garb when we visited the now-defunct Old Sydney Town, but I can’t remember it inducing a passion for history. Watching prisoners being sentenced and whipped was certainly eye-opening for a five-year-old. Robert Hughes described it as “the only theme park in the world devoted to punishment and repression”, so if anything, it might have awakened my darker impulses. But all I wanted to colonise was an ice-cream.

I’m not against dressing up; as a self-confessed drama nerd, I love it. Give me a mullet wig, and I’ll give you Rhonda, a chain-smoking Avon representative and one-time child model with a tragic backstory. But hoping that dressing our kids as hungry caterpillars will awaken them to the joys of literature is lost on me and seems to serve no other purpose than racking up likes on Instagram.

The brutal truth is this: if we’re not in love with books and fighting to keep our precious attention span so we can read for enjoyment, how can we expect that of our kids?

I took up piano because of my dad’s infectious passion for Dr John, the high priest of funk and soul with creole pulsing through his veins. The halls of our clean, Christian home were often filled with Dad playing the sounds of mardi gras and groove, the rhythms of the bayou.

“Listen to this,” he would say, doing some finger-fancy riff. I did piano lessons for years, not because I was told to, but because I could see how fun it was once you’d mastered it. The same could be said of reading; doing so together was a matter of religious devotion.

Reading to your kids is one of the research-based ideas about what mystical juju turns them into lifelong, voracious readers. These mysterious factors are a popular subject of research and contention, especially as reading-for-pleasure statistics in adults and children continue to trend downward.

The not-for-profit Australia Reads cited that children who read for pleasure went from 79 per cent in 2018 to 71 per cent in 2022, which is alarming but not unexpected.

I love reading for pleasure, but I feel a decline in my capacity to do so. My monkey mind bounces from emails to TikTok to news stories in a minute, which makes reading long passages of text so much harder, even though I know how good the pay-off is.

Becoming absorbed in another world or the mind of an intriguing character is one of life’s great pleasures. It’s an entirely different experience from watching a film or a TV show. As any reader knows, stories on the page are conjured up in your imagination, not handed to you (visually) on a platter. Or, as Richard Fidler so brilliantly put it: “Unlike TikTok, the story will only come to life if the reader is willing to serve as a camera operator, costume designer, casting agent and composer.”

It’s a case of “do as I say, not as I do” when it comes to reading, and children can sense the hypocrisy of an adult asking them to read books when that adult rarely – or never – makes the time to do it themselves.

A 2018 study that looked at parents’ role in social attitudes towards reading found that “if they are not readers themselves, it may not yield any positive influence on children’s attitudes to reading.” Or, as the Australia Reads website puts it, in the mind of a child, “if you’re not reading, why should I?”

We can beat the drum of “reading is important” until the colonial cows come home, and sure, dressing up is fun, but let’s not kid ourselves that readers are created in a vacuum or a Very Hungry Caterpillar costume. Save that last-minute dash to Kmart for Harry Potter glasses. Pull up your comfiest chair and the trashiest novel (you can work up to War and Peace). Your kids will see the joys of becoming absorbed in your own private universe, and “Monkey See, Monkey Do” will be more than just a cute name for a kid’s book.

Cherie Gilmour is a freelance writer.

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