Thread: Poll: Are Harry Potter books a good influence on children?

Yes 41%
No 51%
Undecided 6%

Current survey results for 536 entries
Percentages may not add up to 100% due to rounding



What do you think?

IMO books shouldn't influence your child....PARENTS should. Books will teach use of imagination and greater reading skills but I don't think it has anything to do with influence.

Depends on what they mean by influence, but I think they do have a positive influence, either way. They stimulate the imagination and have gotten kids to read more, which is good. Admittedly, I am a huge Harry Potter fan, so I'm biased, but I think the main characters set a good example. They're loyal to each other, show integrity and are brave and do the right thing.

I think what we read as children can have a strong influence on us- I'm proof of that!

Why are children around the world so eager for the next installment of a story about a boy wizard? Maybe it's because they see themselves in him

By Nancy Gibbs


In the same summer day that 6-year-old Catie Hoch beat her own personal best jumping rope—100 in a row—the doctors discovered that the pain in her side was coming from a tumor on her kidney. "In that split second," her mother Gina Peca remembers, "your whole life changes. You're going along safety-proofing your house and trying to feed your kids the right food, thinking you have control over their safety, and you don't."

There was even less control over the course of the next two years as the cancer spread, through seven rounds of chemo, three operations on Catie's lungs and one on her liver. It was during that time that Gina began to read aloud the first three books about a schoolboy wizard named Harry Potter, who knew something about fighting fierce, deadly enemies. Maybe that's why, when they took the train from their home in upstate New York to New York City for treatment, Catie wore a red cape, red lightning-shaped scar on her forehead, a wand and big black glasses. She was ready for anything.

In January 2000, when it seemed as if her treatment options had run out, Catie was back home, her chances of living to read Book 4 looking very slim. That is when an e-mail arrived from someone in Britain who had heard about the 8-year-old girl in New York who loved Harry so much. "I am working very hard on Book 4 at the moment," the author confided, and she talked about the chapter she was writing, how the werewolf professor Lupin was one of her favorite characters, and about some new creatures who would be making their debut. "This is all TOP SECRET," she warned, so Catie could tell her family but nobody else, "or you'll be getting an owl from the Ministry of Magic for giving our secrets away to Muggles." It was signed, "With Lots of Love, J.K. Rowling (Jo to anybody in Gryffindor)."

Over the next days and weeks, Catie wrote to her new friend about her birthday party; her friends; her new dog, Potter Gryffindor Hoch (the first name after Harry's surname and the middle one after the dormitory house in which he lives at school). She seemed to be getting stronger, brighter, in her excitement about her new pen pal. Jo wrote back at length, typing from her home in Scotland as the windows rattled in the January gales. "It's a bit spooky," she wrote one night. "I sleep at the top of the house (like Ron) and when it's stormy like tonight I keep waking up wondering what creaked ... you see, I'm not as brave as Harry—if you told me there was a gigantic snake wandering around at night where I was living, I'd hide under the bedclothes and let someone else sort it out." Jo was candid about other things that frightened her. "I don't mind talking to big groups of people your age at all, because you ask interesting questions, but talking to adults scares me."

Gina watched the friendship unfold, watched a stuffed owl and a toy ginger cat arrive in the mail as gifts. "I couldn't believe it when the first e-mail arrived, but what I really couldn't believe was that they kept it up," she says. "This wasn't a once or twice 'I heard a little girl was sick, and I sent a get-well note.' To me it was a relationship. I don't know what Jo was thinking, but she was taking time out of a very, very busy schedule to write precious e-mails to Catie."

Maybe it was sympathy. But maybe it was admiration. "I admire br***** above almost every other characteristic," Rowling told TIME a few months later, when she sat down to talk about the characters she had created. "Br***** is a very glamorous virtue, but I'm talking br***** in all sorts of places." It is, as Rowling attests from the first chapter of the first book, the virtue that cannot be faked: you either walk into the woods full of giant spiders, or you don't. Stand up to bullies, or hide from them. Hang on to hope, or surrender to fear. She addresses children as though they know as much as or more than she does about the things that matter. Kids like the characters she has created, Harry above all, not because he is fantastic but because he is familiar. Rowling, they say, gets everything right, writes as though she knows what it is to be 13 years old and anxious or shocked at discovering what you can actually do if you try. Maybe she finds her way straight into the hearts of children because she never left in the first place.

That is at least a place to start in trying to understand why Rowling's books are the most popular children's series ever written. It is hard not to believe in magic when you consider what she has done. Through her books, she speaks to kids in Milan and Morocco and Minnesota, and those conversations too are somehow private, even though they are conducted in 200 countries, in 55 languages, in Braille, in 200 million volumes. Children buy her books with their own money. They wear out flashlights reading them after lights-out. Kids with a fear of fat books and dyslexic kids who have never finished a book read Harry Potter not once or twice but a dozen times. Parents report reading levels jumping four grades in two years. They cannot quite believe this gift, that for an entire generation of children, the most powerful entertainment experience of their lives comes not on a screen or a monitor or a disc but on a page.

So many of those children will be tired come Saturday morning, June 21, because on the shortest night of the year, the night when whatever you dream is said to come true, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix goes on sale at one minute past midnight. On that night there will be Potter parties complete with owls and cloaks and butterbeer, and those who can will lobby their parents to let them wear their Potter pjs and sleep in a cupboard under the stairs. Some families have ordered two or three books, to prevent civil war. At 8.5 million copies, this is the largest first printing ever; and at close to 900 pages, the longest children's book there is. It already has the top advance sales in history: it was Amazon.com's best seller two hours after it became available for preordering. And its contents were so secret that a forklift driver was sentenced for stealing pages from a printing plant in Britain and trying to sell them to the Sun for (sterling)25,000, or $41,000.

Not all the numbers are nice, of course: the American Library Association ranks the Harry Potter books as the most challenged in the country; more parents have requested that Harry be banished from bookshelves than they have Huck Finn, more than Catcher in the Rye. Conservative Christian parents have argued that the books promote witchcraft and Satanism; a student in Houston had to get up and leave the room every time the teacher read aloud from Harry Potter. But even that ruckus has calmed down or come to stand for a much larger conversation about what should shape the moral life of children. "I think any unusual focus on things like magic and witchcraft is a bad idea," says Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver, "but these things can also be a natural part of storytelling with children. So I think the Potter argument is really about bigger and deeper battles going on all over the culture about our national character."

There is also a small secular culture war about whether these books are good enough to deserve their acclaim, whether they will endure as classics or fade as fads. The charge, which given the mass popularity is typically made rather quietly, is that the stories are formulaic and conventional. The attack came first and most famously from stuffy Yale professor Harold Bloom, keeper of keys to the literary kingdom, who dismissed the first Harry Potter book as thin and derivative in a 2000 article in the Wall Street Journal and has since refused to look at any of the sequels. "I would think in another generation or so," he told TIME, "Harry Potter will be in the dustbins everywhere. It will be period-piece rubbish because it is so atrociously written." He is, to put it mildly, in a minority; Bloom might be surprised at the number of adult readers who scour the texts for Jungian archetypes and trace the folkloric roots of hinkypunks, mischievous creatures who mislead travelers into bogs. "I think she's a terrific writer," says Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of 80 children's books, who has read the first book. "And she's a ripper- offer, like me. She has taken from some of the best English literature and cooked up her own stew. It's brilliant, and I have every intention of reading the others; otherwise children I know will kill me."

Teachers who actually encounter children every day are just as appreciative. "I don't know that it is literature like The Grapes of Wrath," argues Gail Hackett, a librarian at Monroe Elementary in Des Moines, Iowa. "But it's not Captain Underpants either." Beyond their gratitude at anything that gets kids to read, parents and teachers appreciate how Rowling doesn't pander or patronize. "Generally adults in children's literature are horrible or incompetent," observes Debbie Mitchell of the Magic Tree Book Store in Oak Park, Ill., while Rowling shows adults being wise and fair and, in the gamekeeper Hagrid, the best friend imaginable. Her tone can also grow dark and Grimm in ways that many contemporary children's fantasies don't. "Children's psyches are a lot more sophisticated than we give them credit for," says Suzanne Ferleger, a child therapist in Encino, Calif. "Adults would like to think that in kids' minds the world is rosy. But they sugarcoat the deeper feelings of children. Rowling taps into that on so many levels."




Article is two more pages long .... www.time.com/time/covers/1101030623/story2.html

Originally posted by girlwithsoul
IMO books shouldn't influence your child....PARENTS should. Books will teach use of imagination and greater reading skills but I don't think it has anything to do with influence.

I agree w/ this response... BUT, I do think it influences them to READ, which is the most beneficial skill a child should have and appreciate, IMO. If I had a child, I would be so giddy over the fact that they WANTED to sit down and read an 800 page book that I'm not completely sure that I'd even care what the content was (aside from pure sex or violence). I don't think a greater thing could have happened for children as far as books are concerned since HP was first written... ANY child who WANTS to read should be allowed to, and for that reason alone, I think it is a GREAT influence.

Is there anything people won't complain about anymore?? My gosh it is a book that we can trust our children with and it has encouraged them to read and to read the WHOLE thing. My daughters have read every single one...and working on the new one! Hek, I even like reading them! LOL!

Yes, I think it is fine reading material. I see nothing wrong with the Harry Potter books. The people that say the books are evil and get kids into "witchcraft" and "satan" don't seem to know what they're talking about. I haven't heard that about Disney; which is about the same sort of stuff. Isn't getting kids to read descent books the point? And now some complain because that's what the kids are doing? Until a kid turns his teacher into a toad....I don't see the problem. It's not like they're reading Playboy.

Originally posted by VenusA423
Yes, I think it is fine reading material. I see nothing wrong with the Harry Potter books. The people that say the books are evil and get kids into "witchcraft" and "satan" don't seem to know what they're talking about. I haven't heard that about Disney; which is about the same sort of stuff. Isn't getting kids to read descent books the point? And now some complain because that's what the kids are doing? Until a kid turns his teacher into a toad....I don't see the problem. It's not like they're reading Playboy.

Actually, Disney has just as many problems as Harry Potter. My aunts granddaughter goes to a private Lutheran school where they aren't allowed to bring any lunch boxes/book bags/school accessories that have ANY disney characters or trademarks on them (and they aren't the only place, they just happen to be the one I have first hand knowledge of)... because disney has a yearly 'gay pride day' (or something to that effect) at their parks and the school doesn't want to promote being homosexual so they just banned it all... it's quite rediculous, if you don't want them influenced by homosexuals (tho I'm not really sure how this happens, children raised in homosexual households generally grow up strait) then don't take them to the park on 'gay pride day', but don't ban their favorite cartoon characters just out of spite... it's silly... most of these kids don't even know what it means to be homosexual yet anyways.