Bad Faery

Tuesday, June 17, 2008

No to Age Banding

The subject of age banding is a hot issue in the world of children’s publishing at the moment. If you haven’t heard of it yet it’s a move by publishers to start putting age guidance recommendations on all their books. Now on the face of it this sounds pretty innocuous. After all it’s about making it easier to go into a bookshop and pick out a book for your child.  But herein lies the problem. Age banding is nothing to do with making books more accessible for children, it’s about making them easier for adults to buy (and a lot easier for non-tradititional bookretailers like supermarkets to sell).

And I’m curious as to how they determine which age bracket to put certain books in? Lexical density? Intellectual content? Number of pages? ‘May contain scenes of mild peril’ to borrow a term from movie ratings?

One of my favourite novels from a few years ago was Sophie’s World. What’s interesting about Sophie’s World in regards to the age banding debate was that in its native Norway it was published for the early teen market (the story’s protagonist is a 13 year old girl) but when first published in English it was aimed at adult readers. It was only after it became a bestseller that it started to pop up in Children’s Lit sections of bookshops. Two things - firstly UK publishers seemed to have had a lower expectation of what UK younger readers would read versus continental Europeans and secondly, a good story is a good story and age can be irrelevant in such circumstances.
(Sophie’s World: adult edition, children’s edition, same book, different cover!)

And where does a series like the Harry Potter books fit? The first two could be classified 7+, the next two or three probably 9+ but the last two with all the torture and death, are more likely to be 11+. But HP is a publishers holy cow so maybe it’s exempt from something so ‘practical’ as age banding.

I was a horse mad child and one of my very favourite books was Black Beauty. Reading it at 7 it was an exciting story about a lovely horse, reading it again at 9 and I was noticing just how cruel people were to animals in the story and reading it at 11 I was picking up on not just the cruelty to horses but also the background of poverty and class injustice in 19th century London. Angela Carter once said that “you bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.” For me my experiences of reading and rereading classics like Black Beauty growing up was a great learning experience and I think that’s why from a very early age I have enjoying rereading books and searching for those layers of meaning. I wonder if there had been age banding back then would I have got the chance to read some of these books at such an early age?

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying all age guidance is wrong. I have been a librarian in my day and have catalogued many a children’s book into one age category or another. My problem with this scheme is that by having it printed by the publisher on the book it makes very definitive.  It has a ring of authority about it as Phillip Pullman pointed out in a recent article:
“But when the book itself says 9+, or 11+, that figure has quite a different status. It looks as if the author is assenting to it; it looks as if I’m saying: “I wrote this for 11-year-olds. Everyone else can keep out.”

And there there is the fact that we are so used to age warnings on movies and video games that are there to warn us of unsuitable content that many people are going to automatically think the same is true of books. There are going to be parents who will look with suspicion on books with an age rec’ of 9+ and assume that there must be some content within to merit such an age banding. There will potentially be a situation where parents will feel they are being irresponsible in allowing their children to read books not for their age group in the same way they would feel irresponsible for letting them play a video game for older kids.

It can be tough being a child, it’s a very status conscious world and you’re not going to want to seen dead reading a book with an age rec lower than your actual age, Not of you don’t want to be slagged off by your classmates. And if your reading age is lower than your biological age (which for many kids it is) do you really need to have that fact paraded in front of you every time you pick up a book? Writer and illustrator Jackie Morris brought this very point up on her blog in relating her own reading experiences as a child: “As a kid I struggled to read until I was about 11 and enough of my contempories poured scorn on me to put me off attempting to learn to read for life. Fortunately I loved stories and so persisted. Had there been recommended reading ages on the books I doubt I would have ever been able to go out in public!”.

Everything about age banding smacks of a cheap marketing ploy. I think that it’s no coincidence that this initiative has started at a time when supermarkets are selling more and more books but with no expertise for marketing them. It’s supposedly designed to make consumer choice easier but does so by limiting potential audiences in a fairly arbitrary manner.

If you agree with me and think age banding is misguided then please sign the petition. You’ll be in good company.

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