Opinion: What your son’s reader reveals about his future mental health | Daisy Turnbull
“Breaking a heart can be an act of kindness” is the opening line of Sydney writer Diana Reid’s second novel,. It may not be the greatest opening to a novel ever, but it makes you automatically think of hearts – your own, and those you may have broken.
It is a sentence that imbues perspective and empathy, connecting to your inner life. Books do that. Actually, books should do that. Not all of them do.Credit:in writing and, to a lesser degree, reading. At this point, I have to caution that I am NOT an English teacher. I teach social sciences, comparative religion and sometimes history. They all involve writing. They also all involve perspectives.
Mental health data shows us that we are in a crisis, especially involving teen mental health, even more so for boys. November is men’s mental health month, and across the nation men are downing razors to start conversations andThere seems to be a thread tying these issues together. The boys’ writing crisis, the mens’ mental health crisis, and the consent crisis. These crises all go back to a crisis of empathy, of emotional literacy.
When you have the language for your own emotions, and the ability to understand others, you can deploy that vocabulary for those around you. Not every great reader is a great writer, but it would be hard to find a great writer, or even a wordsmith, who does not read widely. Books could give us a two for one – more reading, better writing and improved empathy.It is not so simple as to say that boys do not read as much as girls, but there is a question about what they are reading.
Girls, however, will read about anyone. Boys tend to read only about boys. “It is a damaging way of how misogyny will play out so early,” Pintado said.by Sally Rippin was hugely successful, but still there was a market of young boys who wanted to read books about another young boy, rather than a young girl. So theseries began. Let’s not tell these kids or their parents about Jane Austen for a few years.