Piquing children’s interest in books
According to the researcher, reading is more than just a pastime for children. “Literature meets them where they are, helps them understand and classify even difficult topics, prompts their fantasy and ability to imagine future worlds,” Röttig says. And it enables a kind of “rehearsing,” a reflection on how they would behave in a particular situation. “Children can thus gain clarity about their feelings, find examples of how others deal with stressful situations, and find comfort knowing they are not alone. Books create places of retreat and at the same time take readers to other worlds, which are funny or sad, exciting or instructive, and invite them to empathize.”
But how do you pique children’s desire to read in the first place? When parents read to their children or look at picture books together, they enter into intensive contact and talk about the stories. “Researchers agree that these experiences of closeness play a key role.” Another decisive factor is whether the parents themselves like reading books, because the little ones learn by example. The family is even considered to be the most important factor in reading socialization. “Children who have been read to a lot already have a rich vocabulary before starting school and know basic story schemes," Röttig says. “They discover letters everywhere in their surroundings – and want to learn to read so they can immerse themselves in stories.“
Literature and ecology
On the other hand, stories can have a great influence on our children, and ultimately even shape how the next generation views the world. According to “Ecocriticism” – a scientific approach that links literary texts with ecology – language can change our perception of nature and connect us with our environment. But for this to succeed, we don’t necessarily need instructive texts, terrible dystopias, or apocalyptic climate fiction. Instead, according to Röttig, we need “literature that connects us with the world around us, opens our senses and hearts to it. You can work to protect what you love.” Take the wolf, for example, whose population has been expanding again in Germany for several decades. A development that has also had an impact on its depiction in children’s books and can therefore have a decisive influence on the public perception of wolves. Away from the archetypal bad wolf of fairy tales towards more understanding, empathy, and respect. “Literature makes it possible to take on the perspectives of non-human species and question traditional moral assumptions,” Röttig explains. Because when we perceive other living beings as thinking and feeling entities, our empathy for them increases. And in doing so, literature also offers a solution to the problem of so-called “environmental doublethink”. In the mid-1990s, the American literary scholar and ecocriticism pioneer Lawrence Buell used this term to describe the problem that knowledge about climate change does not automatically lead to appropriate action. However, Sabine Röttig believes that literature that combines knowledge with emotions and values and thus brings us closer to nature can bridge this gap. In light of all this, she and her colleague Julia Kruse have designed a checklist to support teachers in selecting children’s books with which they can initiate a closer connection with nature.
Understanding trees
Even our relationship with plants can benefit from presenting them more empathetically: After all, many people see plants more as objects since we do not immediately understand their way of communicating. However, a careful humanization of plants could give us better insight into their lives, Röttig believes. “Questioning linguistic conventions can dissolve the culturally made boundary between humans and nature. What happens, for example, if we don’t talk about trees being cut down, but murdered?” An example for this is the children’s book “Willa of the Wood” by Robert Beatty, published in 2018. In this book, the eponymous Willa, a girl from the forest people of the Faeran, uses her ability to communicate with plants to persuade them to sabotage the lumberjacks. What may sound like fantasy is actually inspired by current findings in plant physiology, which show that trees do communicate with each other. Literature that makes children aware of this can break up anthropocentric views and foster a new way of dealing with animals and plants: “Research on plants is currently revealing amazing things, and it is becoming clear how little we know in this field,” Röttig says. “A bit of human humility is certainly appropriate.”
Sabine Röttig is an academic staff member at the Chair of Elementary-School Pedagogics for German. She was involved in the development of the App Voculus, which investigates the influence of audiobooks on learning how to read at schools in Brandenburg.
https://www.uni-potsdam.de/de/gsp-deutsch/forschung/voculus
This text was published in the university magazine Portal – One 2025 “Children” (PDF).