Interview: Raffi and His New CD “Love Bug”

Posted on July 14, 2014 at 8:00 am

Raffi has a new CD! His first new music in twelve years is called Love Bug and it will be available tomorrow.

It was a special thrill to talk to someone whose music has been so important to our family. Many car trips were more memorable than the ultimate destinations because we all sang along to “Baby Beluga,” “Down By the Bay,” and dozens more of his “singable songs.” And I am so grateful for his integrity as a performer, declining offers to sing in enormous arenas because he always wanted his young fans to be able to feel connected to him in a way that is impossible in those venues, and refusing all kinds of lucrative endorsements because he did not want to exploit his relationship with the children who loved his music.

Raffi has devoted himself to protecting children through initiatives like Child Honouring, a program that calls on all adults to commit to a world where all children are entitled to love, to dream, and to belong to a loving “village” — and to pursue a life of purpose.

You really recorded Love Bug in your living room?

Yes! In fact, 80 percent of it was recorded in my living room on the west coast. So you might say that my beautiful view of forest and water and islands and the mountains in the background was the backdrop that inspired the music and even helped get it to sound right. The title song Love Bug that was entirely recorded in my living room and for the first time, on a title song of mine, on a kids’ album I played piano as well as guitar. So that was fun.

The audio was excellent and that’s why I recorded there. I have a wood floor and I have sliding glass doors, and also a stone fireplace. So the combination of wood and glass and stone is excellent especially with the angles from this sort of vaulted ceiling. All of that combined to give me sweet spots. And that’s what I learned, it’s to record where it sounds good rather than go to a sterile studio space and then make it sound good afterwards and add all kinds of effects of sorts.

Who else is on the CD?

Most of the musicians were people I knew either in my community or in Vancouver. But this time around my niece, Kristen Cavoukian, she sang on This Land is Your Land. Her husband Ivan Rosenberg is a wonderful Dobro player and he plays other instruments as well. He played Dobro on the song Water In the Well and he played banjo on Pete’s Banjo. I also had young voices from the island where I live. My island is called Salt Spring Island and it’s a beautiful place.

As it happened on the Love Bug song, the two kids who sing on it, their names are Julia and Gabrielle Love. Can you believe it? Their last name is Love! And their mother Karen Love sings beautifully on the song Magic Wand. So there are many stories around this album, in how it came into being.

I know you are concerned about children spending too much time indoors with electronic devices. Why is it important to get them back outside?

Richard Louv wrote a book about about that called Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. The way I approach this question is that it is the work of newborn babies and infants to bond with not only their caregivers but also the real world that births them into being. The wondrous three-dimensional world of wonders, the place where they explore and touch and feel the elements, the place that gives them other seasons, the flow of a long summer, an unhurried childhood. These are the makings of a person who is filled with wonder, who has her or his imagining capabilities strongly intact. This is the person who is going to do well in life. Not the person who is introduced to infotech early with the misguided idea that it will give them a leg up on that form of communication. That is nonsense actually because infotech is going to change. Five years from now it’s going to be different from what is now. And as I like to remind people, I began to do email when I was 50. Doesn’t hurt me any… I started being on Twitter when I was 62. Wasn’t hard to catch up.

It’s just complete nonsense to suggest that we need to start kids early on infotech. The opposite is true; it is our duty to make sure that children have the kind of play that lets them explore as I said the three dimensions of the real world and also let them have moments of boredom from which a great creativity can spring.

Why do you think boredom is so important?

Well maybe the parents have grown up with too much screen time themselves. And by screen time we used to means television. Now it could also mean other visual screens such as computer game screens, and laptops and the rest of the shiny tech as I call it in my book Lightweb Darkweb: Three Reasons To Reform Social Media Before It Re-Forms Us. Sherry Turkle at MIT made a very good point. If you don’t teach children how to be alone, how to relish solitude, you deprive them of a wonderful gift and they will grow up being lonely because the present moment will never feel good enough unless it’s hyped up.

And you’ve got adults taking workshops, just to learn how to be. Think about that…Just to enjoy this cup of tea, just to enjoy this moment’s gentle breeze as it comes in. I mean, these are the basics to life; these are the riches that we all share.

I love the way that you have titled the book Lightweb Darkweb: Three Reasons To Reform Social Media Before It Re-Forms Us because you’re not trying to say that technology is all bad that we should be haunted by it or terrified of it. You are very balanced in talking about the good and bad. Particularly in the music business, since your last album, hasn’t social media really transformed the way that music is marketed?

As I was saying earlier, it’s the lightweb technology, the digital technology that allows me to record in my living room. What we used to call the recording console was this huge, 6 foot wide, complex piece of machinery. It was like a car. Well, that thing now is in the laptop, and there is a little connector box and my engineer brings very fine microphones, the ones in fact that are in recording studios, he brings them over, the microphones are connected to the little box, the box connects to the laptop and on the laptop has a professional recording software program, away we go, and visual editing is easy. I’ve mentioned all this in the book. In fact I start the book by saying, as a tech enthusiast and troubadours… So I put my tech enthusiast label on right away so that people can see I’m critiquing infotech from that vantage point.

Since my last album 2002, twelve years, we’ve had social media come on the scene and so you could say that Love Bug is the first Raffi CD of the digital era. And I think that’s important because of how social media has changed parenting and how it has changed childhood. And in brief parents now raise children in two different worlds, the real world and the virtual. By that I mean they have to be constantly supervising what their kids are doing in the virtual world. How they’re relating to these shiny tech devices.

I’m asked this question a lot now. People say, “How have children changed with the world changing around them?” And I say well, children in their basic need, young children I’ m talking about because they seem to be my primary audience, young children’s needs don’t change.

As many child development experts such as Berry Brazelton and others have taught us, children’s needs are irreducible and universal. Those needs don’t change. What changes is the world around them and I think that’s where parents, teachers and policymakers and social critics such as ourselves have a duty to remind people that the culture that we create around children must be child honoring, it must respect their innate capabilities, their innate imagining abilities, there innate need for play, it must not overwhelm the young psyche. I quote Columbia University’s expert of technology, Neil Postman. He is the one who helped me understand the importance of this quote: he said it’s not ‘what’ they watch but ‘that’ they watch. In those early years less is more because it’s the emotional intelligence which is by the way one of the nine child honoring principles, its emotional intelligence. That’s the work of the early years.

Did your family love music?

I certainly grew up with it in my family. It was probably because my father was an expert musician. He played a number of instruments including accordion, which is where I got my love for that instrument. I actually love accordions. But he also sang in the Armenian Church choir, and I sang on that choir with him. That’s before in my newly found home in Canada because I grew up in Cairo, Egypt but we migrated when I was 10 years old. In Toronto when I was growing up as a teen, I certainly heard the music of the Beatles and also Motown. And I also had the terrific inspiration of Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan and these people, these great early musicians.

I saw that Pete Seeger was an inspiration for this album. Do you have a favorite Pete Seeger song?

Probably “If I Had a Hammer,” which I actually sang recently. I might record “If I Had a Hammer” and have it be the bonus song on my next CD. Bonus songs are kind of like saying, “Okay, this is the album I did but here is one more song that may or may not belong to this album but here it is, to give it some creative latitude.” I feel like the baton has been passed on to many of us who sing and love sing-along.

Tell me about the young woman that your book is dedicated to.

Lightweb Darkweb is dedicated to Amanda Todd who at the age of fifteen in Vancouver took her life after two or three years of sexual extortion by an online predator. And this is a tragic death that actually could have been averted had the RCMP acted quickly to have smoked out the perpetrator because they know how to do that. In a similar case in Ontario the RCMP intervened quickly and the boy’s life was saved. But the stronger point here perhaps also is the group called the Red Hood Project citizen’s group to urge for corporate social responsibility by the billion dollar social media platform such as Facebook. When we co-wrote an open letter to Facebook’s CEO, Sheryl Sandberg including, signatories including Carol Todd, Amanda’s mother, there was silence. Not a response, not one. And I think that’s tragic because I think the business model of billion dollar corporations that care more about profits than the people their services affect, there’s something wrong with that picture.

You have said that with this album you also honored another recently passed hero, Nelson Mandela. How did his inspiration touch you?

How can I talk about Mandela? The wonderful thing about those who inspire us deeply is that they live on forever. And Mandela’s courage, after 26 years of being imprisoned, and his nobility in that the way he conducted himself, his captors felt like they were the ones in captivity. You have to kneel at the foot of that man. So anyway I was inspired by his words in the year 2000 when he said, empty rhetoric is not enough he said we must turn this world around for the children. I thought that would make a great song and I wrote a song and I recorded it. Got to sing it for him in Toronto in 2001 at Ryerson University and that was an unforgettable event. When I was finished singing the song he stood up and actually shook my hand and it’s something I’ll never forget.

Interview: Children’s Music Star Alex Mitnick

Posted on June 11, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Alex Mitnick stars in Alex & The Kaleidoscope, a fun and friendly series on YouTube and NYC-TV. Mitnick uses music and colorful, inviting adventures to engage children’s curiosity. I really enjoyed talking to him about what makes music such a powerful learning tool and how he teaches teachers, even those who think they have no musical talent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SptyzV8820A

What songs did you like when you were a kid?

Probably my mom singing at the piano which is pretty typical. I imagine for a lot of musicians, it was in the house. My dad plays a little guitar and I always remember my mom singing show tunes and my dad singing folk songs like, “Jump down, turn around, pick a bale of cotton…” There was always music in my house. I have pretty clear memories of dancing around to this reggae record that my parents brought back from Jamaica. And then of course I listened to those early like pre-Raffi kids’ music guys. And most of it was just to the music that my parents listened to.

And what was the first instrument that you played?

I did! I had piano lessons from my very early age from a blind piano teacher who I vaguely remember but we are talking like first, second grade. And then in fourth grade I got the chance to try the saxophone in my public school in Boston where I was living with my family at a time. In fifth grade I switched over to trumpet and I played the trumpet all through fifth grade up to 12^th grade in high school. I was in the school band and I was in the marching band and the jazz band and the concert band and I sang in the choruses at school and I usually did the annual musical. I was never the star but I was always involved with the music program one way or another.

Towards the end of high school, I really found music to be a powerful tool for me to actually socialize with when I was hanging out. I wasn’t necessarily the most talkative kid but by 11^th to 12^th grade there was a core group of guys that whenever we got together, we ended up sort of jamming on guitars or like big African drums or just playing the kitchen table; making some kind of music one way or another as just part of what we did to hang out. And that basically blossomed into kind of jamming on guitar more. And then by my third year in college I switched from Penn State University where I was just pursuing environmental science. Then I finally honed in on guitar and jazz guitar and composition and ended up graduating with a degree in jazz guitar, which in many ways was kind of the beginning of my life as a career musician for sure.

Why is it so important for kids to learn music? As you know music programs are often the first ones cut. Why is it important? What do kids get from studying music?

Well for me I think it became a form of expression that was so much easier for me than necessarily my words or even writing in high school. Having music as a means and an outlet to really show the world who I was was really important for me. And I think for young kids, especially having something like that beside your basic social skills, your basic conversational skills or even writing or math or having this sort of almost instantaneous means to connect to other people or to connect to something you’re passionate about. Maybe you have learned a song on the piano that you hear on the radio and suddenly you’re actually creating something in your life. You are in charge, you see the immediate feedback. I think that is an incredibly empowering tool for anybody but especially kids.

And I would say more basically, it just makes kids happy! Kids playing music are happy, they really are; especially young kids. Young kids dancing and singing are 99 out of 100 times happy and enjoying it. So it’s just this incredible resource for joy and good thing in a child’s life.

I like the way that you encourage kids to create analog instruments out of stuff that’s in the home. So what are some of the instruments that you like to teach them how to make?

The most primal and basic instrument is actually like the human body itself. So when my son is 15 months old he will bang sticks on things but the most fun we had is when he just started moving his body, clapping his hands together, slapping his knees, echoing my musical or rhythmic phrases and expressing himself with just the basic thing he was born with which was his body. And when I teach music class to kids, most of what we do is singing, stomping, clapping, feeling the beat and it is a very physical thing. I can speak from experience with a baby myself, as soon as we are in the kitchen, my son is pulling out all the Tupperware and I am giving him spoons and eggbeaters and anything that he can get his hands on to just start playing along and making some noise. And then in addition to that, the work I’ve done with kids, there are so many simple tasks like making a paper cup, filling it with beans or rice or beads or something like that, taping over the top and then suddenly you’ve got a couple of shakers and maracas right there. And then you can do that same thing with all sorts of recycling material like plastic pens or coffee cans and especially you can turn anything into some kind of unique percussion instrument. A little bit of time and effort and you’ve got yourself a little percussion orchestra.

What kind of music do kids like best? I know they all love the songs from “Frozen!”

The “Frozen” thing is for one, just an absolutely brilliant multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign; which has essentially got it into every single family’s car or YouTube or whatever. It is just brilliant across-the-board! But also, I think people like to also be able to sing familiar songs with other kids, so everybody knows the song. If it’s not that, it’s “Happy” from Pharrell Williams. It goes to show you how much you appreciate happy sounding and joyful music.

Good music is good music whether you call it kids’ music or not and that is certainly the case with me and my son. I just basically play music that I like, anything with an upbeat rhythm and a happy melody, he is really responsive. Parents in my generation really grew up listening to some pretty great music. We were listening to rock and pop as kids and so we’re trying to re-create that experience for ourselves with our own kids, playing stuff like the Beastie Boys or Beach Boys whatever it is.

That’s really my philosophy when I write music for kids. Like I want to listen to it. I really don’t put on much for my son that I seriously wouldn’t want to be blasting in my car myself.

You wrote an album for him, didn’t you?

Yes — Love Songs for My Baby. It’s just like this outpouring of emotion and affection from the parents towards the child.

What are some of the fun topics that you address in your songs for children?

I am inspired by the beauty and wonder of childhood itself. And like with my TV show: Alex and the Kaleidoscope, the whole point is that when you are looking through the kaleidoscope, you’re actually looking through the eyes of the child. So essentially, if you can turn them on to something, it would really be anything, any subject whatsoever. And that is what is so cool about music; you give it like a fun upbeat rhythm and a catchy little melody, you can essentially teach a child about anything with a song. And I have got songs about everything. On our TV shows we go to the zoo, we go to the aquariums, we have a shark song, we have a Kangaroo song, we have train songs, we have human body songs and we have songs about gardening, we have songs about space or about the sky, it’s limitless!

Kids truly have a sense of wonder almost of anything and it’s our job as teachers and adult and I think and in particular entertainers of kids, to basically turn them onto that wonder.

How do you help teachers learn how to incorporate music?

Well it’s actually pretty funny because I essentially do exactly what I do with a bunch of like 3 to 6-year-olds, except they are all adults so they have all these other inhibitions. But it’s all based on the theory that each and every one of us has music in us somewhere. Very few people I’ve ever met don’t have some kind of natural response to music and so in my typical way of making it kind of fun and playful and just taking the pressure off of participants in these workshops, we just go through rhythms, games and exercises or take funny songs that they might know and just turn them into more broad games. And then suddenly, some of the people who would never call themselves musicians without any instruments or anything are all jamming together making music.

Screen-Free Week 2014 Starts Tomorrow

Posted on May 4, 2014 at 8:58 am

Check out these ideas to help your family detox from television and the internet. And before you turn off your computers for a week, watch this to remind you what we miss when we look at screens instead of each other. Be sure to stay for the end.

Interview: Overcoming Autism with Claire LaZebnik

Posted on March 24, 2014 at 3:57 pm

A completely revised new edition of the indispensable book Overcoming Autism: Finding the Answers, Strategies, and Hope That Can Transform a Child’s Life comes out tomorrow. The original, published ten years ago, was written by Dr. Lynn Koegel, the nationally recognized head of the Autism Research Center at the University of California, and Claire LaZebnik, a professional writer and the mother of a son with autism. The combined perspectives of the expert and the mother give this book both authority and emotional heft. It is wise, hopeful, generous, and compassionate. I am very grateful to Ms. LaZebnik for answering my questions.

The word “overcoming” in your title is a bold one. How did you choose it?

Well, as Dr. Koegel and I often say, the title is shorthand for “Overcoming the symptoms of autism that make life more difficult” — but that’s not as catchy. Our goal isn’t to get rid of autism; it’s to help alleviate any of its symptoms that make life more difficult for the child and to teach the child to reach his or her full potential. People with autism have many strengths. We don’t want to get rid of those; we just want to use them in a positive and productive way.

This is an update of a book originally published ten years ago. What have been the biggest changes in the understanding and treatment of autism since that time? In public understanding of autism?

People are far and away more aware of autism now than they were back then. It’s rare to meet someone today who doesn’t have a family member or friend who’s on the spectrum. As a result, people are more informed (sometimes, sadly, more MISinformed) and more aware that you can have autism and be a vital, involved, and valuable member of your community—back when we were first writing, it was seen as something more debilitating and alienating. All of that is positive, and we’ve tried to incorporate the changing attitudes in our revision. We also call on the community to be more accepting of those who don’t fit into a narrow definition of “normalcy:” different viewpoints and experiences enrich our collective knowledge.

Interestingly, many of the behavioral interventions we described in our first edition still work. We’ve added some newer ones; we have more research on specific interventions and we’ve learned even more about which behaviors to target to bring about the greatest progress. But the interventions described in our first edition continue to work, and we’re happy to say that the last decade of research validates everything that was in our original book.

Both parents and children with autism can feel isolated, and it can be particularly devastating when parents grieve separately rather than together. What can we do to make schoolmates and communities be more effective in providing support?

As I said above, we have to make our communities aware that differences enrich us all. We need to learn to smile at people who are struggling with a tantruming child and to offer our support if a family wants to include a child with any kind of difference in a community or school activity. I do think honesty and outspokenness help: for instance, families will sometimes go in to speak to a classroom to explain the ways in which the other students can support their child and that’s almost always of huge benefit to everyone in the classroom. Of course, acceptance has to come from the top: if a principal or a community leader acts like a child with special needs is a burden, others will take the lead from him or her. It’s important for inclusion to be practiced from the top down.

Isn’t it spoiling a child to give rewards like candy?

All good parenting boils down to reinforcing the behaviors you want to see and ignoring/discouraging the ones you don’t want to see. I don’t think it’s spoiling to give a child a piece of candy if he’s worked hard to get it—and “working hard” for a child with autism can sometimes mean making a vocalization to ask for it rather than simply screaming. If you give a child a candy to calm him down when he’s been misbehaving, you ARE spoiling him—you’re teaching him that bad behaviors get good rewards. But if you give that same child a piece of candy because he’s sat quietly and listened for an agreed-upon amount of time, you’re doing the opposite of spoiling him: you’re inspiring him to keep up the good work and letting him know you’re proud of him. That’s how he’ll learn and grow Often, that piece of candy or a promised fun outing will be the only thing that motivates a child with autism, whose social difficulties may keep him from finding praise as rewarding as typical children do.

Parents are used to measuring their children against other children and established developmental milestones. But you urge parents not to compare their children to other children with autism. Why is that?

It’s important to stay upbeat and proud of your child’s accomplishments: comparing him to typical children of the same age may feel frustrating, and that’s not helpful to either of you. However, understanding what other children are doing at certain ages can be helpful in developing goals for your child.

You have a “golden rule” — treat your child as you would if he did not have a disability. Why is that so important?

Because it forces you to stay on the right track. If you constantly make excuses for your child and let him get away with behaving in ways you’d never let your other children behave, you’re not guiding him properly and you’re probably damaging his relationships with other people. You don’t want to compromise your expectations for your child simply because it feels like work to make sure she doesn’t hit other people or has to ask nicely for a snack. All kids need rules and clear guidelines.

One striking theme throughout the book is the focus on the child’s strengths as a starting point. What are some of the strengths you see in children with autism and can you give an example of one that can be built on?

Most children with ASD have strong visual skills. Some are very good readers at an early age (my son was). A good teacher might ask the child to read out loud to the other students: it’s a nice way for them to connect and can lead to some real admiration from the other kids. Children with autism often know a lot about a very specific subject, like trains or presidents or (in one case I saw) fruit bats. If an aide or teacher or parent can structure a game around that interest, the child with autism will be the most sought after team member in the group, which builds pride and respect.

What do you mean by “prompting and fading?” Isn’t that good advice for all parents?

We all do it already! Think about how we teach kids to say “thank you.” First we say it for them, when they’re too little to talk. Then, when they start speaking, we prompt them to say it every time someone does something for them or hands them something. Then we “fade” back, and wait for them to say it on their own at appropriate times. If they don’t remember to say it, we quietly remind them. Eventually, over time, children learn to say “thank you” without any prompting at all, and we can fade our prompts entirely. Kids with autism may need more prompting at the beginning than other kids—for instance, they may need to be prompted to greet a friend or share a treat or ask a question in class at an age when other kids are already doing all of that on their own–but the process is exactly the same.

Children with autism miss social cues that seem to come naturally to neurotypical kids, and that sometimes causes people to conclude that they do not care what their peers think about them. Claire, your story about telling Andrew that his puppet hands stimulation looked strange to other children shows that is not the case. Are children with autism usually receptive to being told how they are perceived and what they can do to fit in? And what about the issue you identified that teaching them to respond to peer pressure can backfire when they become teenagers?

I think it does depend on the child. Andrew happened to be very motivated to fit in with his peers: he wanted to make friends and so he responded to any advice we gave him toward that end. So when we casually suggested that he save his “hand puppets” for the privacy of our home because the other kids might think they looked strange, he totally got that and did his best to control them out in public. Another child might not be as motivated by the idea of fitting in, but I think you’d be surprised how many kids with autism really do want to make friends and have playmates—a lot of inappropriate behaviors, like pushing or following another child really come out of a desire to engage. Those kids have to be taught how to approach another child appropriately.

I do have concerns that the whole “look what the other kid is doing and do that” approach has the potential to backfire when kids are teenagers and are engaging in some activities that parents aren’t so thrilled about. So Dr. Koegel and I have somewhat tempered our message along those lines: we now stress the importance of teaching your child to distinguish between appropriate and inappropriate behaviors and not imitate blindly. We’re all trying to teach our kids that, right?

What were some of the factors you considered in deciding to include stories about your own family? What were Andrew’s thoughts ten years ago and how does he feel about it now?

When my son was diagnosed, I wanted desperately to know older kids and adults on the spectrum, to have a sense of what was in store for us all. I didn’t know any other families dealing with it until we entered a program designed specifically for kids with autism, and then the other mothers and I were all eager to share stories and advice. I felt it was important to put myself out there and share our early stories because it can be so lonely and isolating to be a parent of a kid who’s developing at a different pace and in a different way from the other kids.

Andrew was very proud when the book first came out: he was around eleven or twelve, I think, and he made a speech at the book party, thanking everyone who had ever helped him and bringing tears to all our eyes. Now that he’s in his twenties, he’s a little more reserved, but he contributed essays to our second collaboration (Growing Up on the Spectrum: A Guide to Life, Love, and Learning for Teens and Young Adults with Autism and Asperger’s) and remains supportive of the project. I am more careful about the stories I tell, though. If you read my newest essays, you’ll see that they’re more general and less specific. I need to respect the fact that he’s an adult and his stories are no longer mine to tell. He has remained very interested in helping others on the spectrum, and is currently working on a project toward that end—I’m excited about it, but not sure if I’m allowed to talk about it in public yet!

All Children Need Books About All Children

Posted on March 20, 2014 at 8:00 am

Author Walter Dean Myers, former Library of Congress National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, wrote about a troubling issue in the New York Times: the lack of diversity in books for children. “Of 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.”

Myers speaks very personally, about the impact on him as a child who loved books but sought in vain to find some semblance of the world he knew in them.

I needed more than the characters in the Bible to identify with, or even the characters in Arthur Miller’s plays or my beloved Balzac. As I discovered who I was, a black teenager in a white-dominated world, I saw that these characters, these lives, were not mine. I didn’t want to become the “black” representative, or some shining example of diversity. What I wanted, needed really, was to become an integral and valued part of the mosaic that I saw around me.

Books did not become my enemies. They were more like friends with whom I no longer felt comfortable. I stopped reading. I stopped going to school. On my 17th birthday, I joined the Army. In retrospect I see that I had lost the potential person I would become — an odd idea that I could not have articulated at the time, but that seems so clear today.

And he makes it clear that it is just as important for children to read about characters of other races as it is to read about their own.

Books transmit values. They explore our common humanity. What is the message when some children are not represented in those books? Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future white loan officers and future white politicians going to get their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?

The same day Myers’ essay appeared, the Guardian announced a new policy for reviewing books intended for children. If the book is marketed only to one gender, they will not review it. Literary editor Kay Guest wrote:

I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.

As Myers said, books give us an idea of who we are and what we can be. They also teach us empathy for others. They can do this best when they reflect the world as it is, made up of people with many differences and many connections.