{"id":278663,"date":"2026-02-07T08:17:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-07T08:17:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/278663\/"},"modified":"2026-02-07T08:17:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-07T08:17:14","slug":"childrens-author-jacqueline-wilson-reading-is-in-danger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/278663\/","title":{"rendered":"Children’s author Jacqueline Wilson: ‘Reading is in danger’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Wilson as a child, around the time she attended to Festival of Britain<\/p>\n

I was impressed by the tallness of the Skylon [a futuristic steel structure], but I must admit that the one thing that stuck in my mind was the miniature train, which was designed by someone called Rowland Emett, and I was allowed to ride on it. Afterwards, my parents and I went to the South Bank because there was dancing after dark, which was one of the most exciting things ever. <\/p>\n

Then my bedtime was, I think, 6.30pm, but we stayed up practically till midnight. My parents danced, and I stood on my father\u2019s shoes. I remember vividly looking up at the stars and thinking, \u201cI am up so late. I will never, ever be up this late again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though we\u2019d won the war, we seemed, in a way, to have lost the peace, because everything was so grim for everybody. But then it did start to be this new exciting time. Perhaps we need a new festival now.<\/p>\n

Read more:<\/p>\n

Has technology done away with that kind of childhood magic?<\/p>\n

There are all sorts of possibilities \u2013 here we are talking together remotely as if we were in the same room \u2013 but I think it\u2019s really impacting children. I find it quite worrying when you go in a cafe and you see a child of about two holding one of those big baby tablets and immersed in some loud, flashy thing that they\u2019re staring at. That can\u2019t help but be detrimental to a child\u2019s development.<\/p>\n

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A few years ago, nursery schoolteachers were consulted, and they said that for children for whom screen time was actively discouraged, and who had more time chatting to their parents or being read to, their vocabularies were much, much more developed and sophisticated than the ones who looked at a screen all the time. I think that says it all.<\/p>\n

Also, like many stodgy old people, I am appalled that children can access the most terrifying things on social media. Appalling images of violence and cruelty can stay in their heads and bizarre representations of what sex is like. If we had a person coming into each and every house and telling children all these lurid things, we\u2019d be absolutely horrified. But it is like many people actually coming and speaking directly to the children, and I don\u2019t think that when you are a child, you can discriminate between what is normal and what is completely sick, and it\u2019s very, very influential.<\/p>\n

Is reading at risk in our digital age?<\/p>\n

There are still many children who do enjoy reading, and their faces light up talking about a book they\u2019ve loved. But mostly reading is in danger. It\u2019s becoming a really niche thing, like stamp collecting. It\u2019s so frightening that so many bright, intelligent young people look aghast at the idea of reading a Dickens or even a Jane Austen, and they say, \u201cOh, no, it\u2019s so boring.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"The Festival of Britain on London\u2019s South Bank, 1951<\/p>\n

Your books deal with social issues, including the care system. Has much changed?<\/p>\n

I think the care system inevitably has to struggle. I\u2019ve got several friends involved with foster care, and I\u2019m proud to be an ambassador of the East Sussex Foster Care Association. I\u2019ve been very much involved in the past with the fostering network, and it\u2019s no easy job, fostering a troubled child who\u2019s had a difficult start, but it\u2019s the most wonderful and rewarding thing. But there aren\u2019t enough foster parents now, and it\u2019s worrying when you see newspaper reports of children in hostels where there isn\u2019t enough care to make sure that they\u2019re in at the right time, not hanging around dubious people.<\/p>\n

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What did you learn from talking to care-experienced young people through Big Issue? [In 2018 Big Issue arranged for Wilson to meet with Who Cares? Scotland<\/a> to talk about stigma and representation in Tracy Beaker stories.]<\/p>\n

I found it very, very useful. I was so impressed. Everything was expressed calmly and we had a good discussion, and I learned a lot from them. Hopefully they might have learned a little bit about why I had approached something in a certain way, and what you can and can\u2019t say in what is actually a children\u2019s book. And then when I wrote a sequel called We Are the Beaker Girls, I dedicated it to them, and had taken on board some of the points they had made. It was a very, very worthwhile meeting, and I was highly impressed by them all.<\/p>\n

\"\"Illustration by Rachael Dean from The Best Sleepover in the World. Illustration: Rachael Dean<\/p>\n

What can parents and children look forward to at your sleepover?<\/p>\n

I will be there with my lovely illustrator, Rachael Dean, and we will be talking about the Sleepover series and sleepovers in general. Rachael\u2019s going to be doing a draw-along, and then the children are going to have a lovely tour around the Festival Hall, and there\u2019s all sorts of activities for them. Then they get me again! <\/p>\n

Possibly my job is to calm them down, but we\u2019ll do something interactive \u2013 I have in mind some kind of quiz that doesn\u2019t get them too hyper. Then I will be wishing them all goodnight and hopping on the train back home, because my days of lying in a sleeping bag on the floor are long over!<\/p>\n

Imagine is running from 11-21 February at the Southbank Centre,<\/a> including An Evening with Jacqueline Wilson and Rachael Dean on 15 February. <\/p>\n

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Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this?\u00a0Get in touch and tell us more<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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You can also support online with a\u00a0vendor support kit<\/a>\u00a0or a\u00a0magazine subscription<\/a>. Thank you for standing with Big Issue vendors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wilson as a child, around the time she attended to Festival of Britain I was impressed by the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278664,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[412,143533,13745,146,2320,40074,85,1037,46,55179],"class_list":["post-278663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-books","tag-care-experience","tag-childrens-books","tag-entertainment","tag-festivals","tag-from-the-magazine","tag-il","tag-interview","tag-israel","tag-representation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278663"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278663\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278664"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}