Will your kids love your favorite childhood reads? Let’s get to it: Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. I’m reaching way back with this one (1881), but after all, who doesn’t love a good rags to-riches story?

Oh, those little Peppers. How well I remember Phronsie, Ben, Polly, Joel and Davie, and how hard they worked in the little brown house to help their poor mother, Mamsie. My kids are not yet at an age when they realize just how poor the Peppers are. But my kids are as drawn to this story as I was as a child. And I am not the one to turn down an opportunity to share an example of children gladly helping their mother.

I’m not reaching back quite as far with 1943’s Cherry Ames, Student Nurse by Helen Wells, but convincing my kids that once it wasn’t easy for nurses to wear caps and dresses. When I was little, I couldn’t get enough of Cherry’s adventures. How pioneering Cherry was! She had a job when there were few jobs available to women, she never got married, and she solved mysteries when men couldn’t. Cherry always knew what to do. She was smart, pretty, strong and ambitious. I love her.

I know the time will come when my son asks, “Come on, Mom, Didn’t you read any books with men in them?” and I’ll have to answer honestly, “No. But maybe one day a few.”

The day will come when we can go back to the library and see what is new on the shelves, and that will be a great day. But for now, I plan not to let any book on our shelves go to waste. It may seem that reaching for a book that’s more than a century older than my kids is just as ambitious as reading Frankenstein, but I’m really confident, this time.

In the pre-COVID-19 era, children’s personalised books used to be a niche market (小众市 场). Far from their early version that merely had the child’s name stuck on the book cover today’s personalised books feature entire families — including pets. Instead of meeting unknowr characters and new story worlds, the readers meet themselves. With the persuasive power of personalisation, publishers find their way into children’s inner worlds quicker than with non- personalised books

Well-designed personalised books can enhance children’s vocabulary learning. However, it’s also been found that in their talk about the story of a personalised book, they talk about “me, me, me”. Part of this self-centredness is natural at a young age, but part of it is caused by the personalised character of the book. In a recent study, personalised books, as opposed to thei non-personalised versions, do not help children understand the moral of a story or apply it to thei own lives

In most popular personalised books, children are pictured as the heroes and stars of their own stories. What is certain is that in addition to personalised hero books, we need personalised books where the child is a minor character or a character who experiences depression. The problem is that such books are unlikely to be popular and are therefore unlikely to be written. We are thus heading towards a situation where children see themselves in a positive light in their own personalised books and where they see others as failures in non-personalised books. It introduces children to a culture of“me vs you” where shared humanity is replaced by a false narrative of “I am the best!”

The most powerful children’s books are those that hit the sweet spot of personalisation and diversity. Such books teach children out-group empathy (同感) that occurs with story characters whose,experiences are different from their own. Authors can convey such out-group empathy by constructing strong plots that immerse (使沉浸) children in the story, but also challenge them to think beyond their comfort zone. The current personalised books take us from this ideal. They represent an economic interest in individualisation, and might ill prepare young minds for an uncertain future.

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