We bring our children to the bookstore for more than the obvious reasons. We are training them to “No.” We have an outing to the bookstore about twice a month. It used to be once a month, but now we live in civilization (Upstate New York) and so we can manage the trip twice a month. We tell them we will buy them each a book. But really what we are doing is teaching them “No.” See, the bookstore has an incredible café with pastries and hot chocolate and lots of fun, fruity drinks, all at astronomical prices. It also has $4 chocolate bars at eye level and lots of toys with accompanying manuals disguised as books. And to all these things, we say, “No.” This drives them insane. Chris and I spend the morning leisurely perusing the shelves of “Self-help” and “Mental Health” and “Parenting” smugly knowing that if we wrote our own book, we’d be millionaires, because all you really need to raise kind, loving children is a good bookstore with all the bells and whistles. Well, actually, we don’t know what kind of children we are raising; it is just our version of a sick joke to continuously take them there. And when you have two teenage girls and a whiner, any kind of sadistic satisfaction that doesn’t leave a mark seems to still be acceptable behavior, especially under the guise of furthering their educational horizons. Needless to say, they’re now onto us. So here was the conversation:
“Hey Dad, where are we going?”
“I thought I’d take you guys to the bookstore – you can each get a book.”
Groan. “I don’t want to go to the bookstore.”
“I’m willing to buy you a book and you are not saying ‘Thank you’?”
“Thank you.”
Little Miss Sunshine: “Well I’m not saying ‘thank you, I can’t stand the bookstore. I want to do something else.”
“Something else like find your glasses? The book looks better when you don’t see double. Just my opinion.”
“I hate my glasses.”
“I hate them too, they cost me $300.”
“Dad, forget her glasses. The rest of us know how to read. Can’t we do something else?”
“Can I tip you over for a glass of chardonnay, because you have quite the WHINE.”
“That’s an old joke. I want to do something exciting. Dad, can we go skydiving?”
“If your version of skydiving is me tying the corners of a bedsheet to your suspenders and pushing you off the roof, then sure, we can go skydiving.”
“Very funny.”
‘Then the bookstore it is.”
Another weekend well spent. Another lesson well learned. They ought to pay us more…
So, your outing is not really about the book at all, which it should be. It is about the candy and toys that they can’t have. Essentially, you’re setting these kids up to never go into bookstores because now they have learned to hate them. The bookstore now represents everything they cannot have, except for books, which they don’t seem to want anyway.
You should have started bringing them to a library, where they could bring home as many books as they like, and keep coming back for more. Libraries don’t have coffee and toys and chocolate, so all they’d learn is a love for books, not a love for commercialism. And maybe a shared family outing to the library would be about growth and learning, which can also be fun.
But hey, maybe your little experiment will work. I have my doubts, however.
You think taking teen agers to the library will be more apetizing to them than a trip to a book store and somehow solve the dilemma of raising them in this pervasively consumeristic culture?! Wow – where do you live? Do you really have children? Are they real? I couldn’t get mine to go to either place even with a bribe. At least at a book store you can talk.
Hey Library Lady, lighten up! Our kids love the library! We each have multiple library cards from multiple states! We’ve kept books from across the country! As a matter of fact, that’s the reason we’ve had to move so many times…it’s the library fines! C’mon now, if we can still get our kids to go to the bookstore after 15 years and one of them can hardly focus on the giant E on the eye chart, don’t you think that maybe I was…umm…JOKING???
Barbaramarybeth……Okay, fair enough. No mention of reading any of those books threw me off, I guess.
I suppose a trip to the library CAN be boring, Anonymous, but then that depends on the kids…and the library. Enough said.