06/16/2026
From the New Yorker's article, Why “Book-Shaming” Won’t Solve the Children’s Literacy Crisis"
“As adults, we might say, ‘That’s not real reading,’ but it absolutely is,” Laverde said.
Among the fiction titles that do connect with kids in this age bracket, some of the biggest commercial hits are essentially entry-level graphic novels, such as Kinney’s “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” Dav Pilkey’s “Captain Underpants” and “Dog Man,” Lincoln Peirce’s “Big Nate,” and Aaron Blabey’s “The Bad Guys.” These are “light, funny stories-with-pictures that can help uncertain readers make the leap from picture books to big-kid books,” Dan Kois wrote in a 2024 piece for Slate.
But librarians and educators stress that what’s more important than matters of taste is keeping kids conditioned to reading at a crucial developmental moment.
Where do you fall in the debate of letting kids read what they want?
