Affluenza in the Library

Our summer reading club ends this weekend, which always creates a bit of anxiety for me. This is the moment of truth, for our reading club members and for us, too. For the members, did they meet the club goal in order to receive their prize? And for us, what can of worms have we opened by incentivizing reading in this way?

This is the time when we hear all kinds of excuse from parents why their child could not meet the reading goal. Said child was on vacation with the family. Said child had summer camp. Said child read very challenging books. Or, most frequently, "But my child read Harry Potter!"

There is no question that by setting a flat goal for all members (unless parents make special arrangements at the beginning of the summer), the club is not fair. Some kids are strong readers, others are not. Some kids read books way below their level, others stretch above. Some kids have five million structured activities, others have none. Yet we ask the same thing of each of them: to read eight books in ten weeks. It is not fair, in the way that very little in life is. But it's the best solution we've come up with so far.

I don't like making reading a numbers game. It doesn't seem right to say, "Read one Harry Potter book if you like, then read seven easy readers just so you can meet the goal." (Members can, of course, do so.) We praise all the members who report on their books, regardless of whether they will meet the club goal. There are small prizes along the way, too. But that final prize becomes larger than life in the eyes of some parents.

That's when we end up with situations that are stressful for staff, humiliating for the children, and... I don't know what... for the freaked out parents. Fortunately, it is not anything close to a majority of parents who do this; it's really only a handful, but they make themselves memorable. They hold their child's reading log in your face (as the child stands close by, staring at the ground), inform you that little Johnny/Susie worked really, really hard to read those two books, and waits expectantly for you to say, "Yes, of course, just because you asked, it's perfectly all right if Johnny/Susie gets the same prize as the children who followed the rules and met the goal."

My supervisor directed our attention to an editorial in yesterday's New York Times, Camp Codependence, about the "affluenza" infecting certain well-to-do parents. They are pushy. They are overprotective. They encourage their children to break rules, both by example and by suggestion.

That's what these particular (and again, fortunately, few) summer reading club parents are doing when they ask the rules to be broken just, apparently, so they can get a prize. If it's unhealthy for the library to incentivize reading through our goals and prizes (a matter of some debate), it's even unhealthier for parents to devalue their children's efforts by placing so much importance on the prize, over the reading experience, that they demand the rules be broken in order to get it.