Advice on Child Rearing - How Children should be Encouraged to Read Literary Magazines

Children should be encouraged to read literary magazines. Sure it will warp you a bit to read the adult content or look at the odd Sow's Ear. So the norm of our culture may be moving closer and closer to Youtube videos of slam poetry, but the Poem must not die. What I say the Poem I am talking about the words curve on the page or punch into the blog or document on the computer. Ultimately this is not a war between the rough print of paper and the screen, but plea for CPR into the lovely thing that a Poem when read, just read in the mind. Children need to enter the world scouring over these weird columns of font. They need to have families or mentors that can explain to them, hun, that is a Poem. And then they need to work just as hard at reading Poems as Make Way for the Ducklings. Shell Silverstein is a great writer of children's Poetry, but it is not such a bad thing to also send them loose into the Heavy Stuff. Where can you find Poems? Poems are everywhere if you look for them. Every college has some antiquated student group holding tight to the diminishing threads of Poetry. Find their journal, go to the library and get the big famous authors like Mary Oliver or Pablo Neruda, but also pick up the ones that are likely written by some local Poet who nobody knows. Poetry should be present, not shoved down the child's throat by any means, but an open book in front of the toilet. Your job is to make sure the kid washes her hands. Find out what sort of poems the child is into until you see him scribbling one day in that odd column form. Maybe this is junior high, or elementary or high school. It depends on how good of a job you have done. Ask her if she minds to have you read her Poem, suggest she submit it to the local arts magazine or a contest in Cricket Magazine. These words in Poems that your child is learning to spell and use and and crave - these are the power your child has when in high school her friends turn to their depression or peer pressure. Your child will need these carefully placed letters all throughout his life to sort through her own thoughts, to make gentle suggestions like the use of a particular pronoun to make a point, to speak when her voice is afraid. Your child will need these lines through life to be more literate in reading and grammar which puts him ahead or behind the curve. Don't traumatize your child with literature that is hard to read, but give her a chance to preserve the Poem, the call to appreciate beauty that Poetry inspire, beauty in the Poem, beauty in the Poet, Beauty abounding all around us feeding into our words.

Into the Hearts of Leaves

Into of the hearts of catalpa branches,
into the hearts of leaves,
into the hearts of the maple branches,
all loving me.