Name: Meet Free Expression Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon
Uploaded: 2026-01-09T18:20:00Z
Duration: 18 min 51 s
Description: Free Expression columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon speaks with Free Ex associate editor Mary Julia Koch about iPad kids, the importance of reading aloud to people of all ages and the evolution of children's literature.

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Free Expression columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon speaks with Free Ex associate editor Mary Julia Koch about iPad kids, the importance of reading aloud to people of all ages and the evolution of children's literature.

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260109/3eef2922-97a1-436f-991b-9d3b2b0f371b/2/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Meet Free Expression Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon

Hello, I'm thrilled to introduce Meghan Cox Gurdon as a columnist for "Free Expression," a newsletter recently launched by the opinion pages of "The Wall Street Journal." Meghan, thank you for joining me.

Oh, boy, my pleasure.

So you've been writing about children's books for "The Wall Street Journal" for more than 20 years.

Yeah.

Is that right?

That's right, yeah. I wrote a lot of other different book reviews in the early days, and then when the paper started its weekend section, there was the opportunity to sort of get a beat, and they offered me children's books, which was perfect for me, because I had a house full of children. So I had a focus group built in. And yeah, and that turned into, at first, it was a once-a-month thing, I think, in the early days, 2005 or so. No, sorry, 2008. And then it became a weekly gig, and I covered everything, from baby books to teen literature. And after 20 years, I feel like I had my fill of it. I think I gave the readers as much as I could, and it was time to do something else.

Yeah, I'd love to ask a bit about, since it was your beat for so many years, the state of children's literature and young adult literature today, especially when we're seeing fewer and fewer young people are reading.

The decline in reading is a really grievous thing, and it's very important as a culture, I think, that we take measures to reverse it. One of the difficulties that we've had. Look, I will say, when I started writing about children's books 20 something years ago, of course as an adult it's a little more difficult to read with the eye of a child, right? So I was reading books that I was reading them as an adult and evaluating them as an adult to read to and with my children or for my children to read for themselves. But things really became kind of funky in the children's book world. At the same time that they became funky in the larger culture, this cultural revolution that we have undergone with gender ideology, identity politics, making themselves felt in every institution, that all flooded into children's books. And so the kind of very tenor of what was appropriate for children changed very much during the time that I was covering books. And I would sometimes, honestly, I mean, it's a great, I don't want in any way to imply that it wasn't a kind of an honor to be part of the filtration process as it were for "Wall Street Journal" readers to tell them about children's books. And it really was my job, as I saw it, to extract from the chaff some lovely pieces of gold. But, man, there was a lot of chaff. And there there were days when I would open up boxes and boxes of books in my office and just feel this deep inner despair at the degraded sort of ugly art, very didactic content, titles for, "Anti-Racist Baby" being one of them. Just this ridiculous political esoteric stuff aimed at little tiny children, who are just starting in the world and deserve their crack at it, unmolested, as it were, by adults and their preoccupations and their politics. I found that the gender ideology in children's books to be particularly egregious. There is a perhaps worthy, I think it's debatable, but there's an argument that people of all kinds should be able to see themselves in literature. Now, I'm of the old-school view that, actually, if you're reading literature, if you're seeing an aspect of humanity, you're seeing part of yourself. I don't need to see women of my exact age and demographic and hairstyle in a book to feel connected to it. I love, for instance, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," and there is nobody like me in those books. Doesn't mean I don't see myself there. But it was a much more literal understanding of representation that came into children's books. And so characters had to, every possible emanation of any sort of political confession in our current world it was felt needed to get into children's books. So you could be reading historical fiction set in the middle of the 19th century out West. There was one particular book in which a principle character, which was actually based historically on a male, on a steamboat captain, was turned into a man in a dress. And his identity as a transgender individual was not revealed until 3/4 of the way through the book. So any parent kind of scanning the book would not know that that was the case. A child reading the book wouldn't necessarily know it was the case. There were certain clues in the text that there was something a little odd about this guy, or not exactly standard issue. But that was the kind of thing I was seeing, and there was a lot of it, in books for children of every age group, all the way down to babies. I mean, the proselytizing and propagandizing, the prioritizing of politics over story, it's been a real problem. And I think it's really degraded the world of children's literature.

Right, it seems that the narratives themselves aren't as compelling, beyond even the ideological component. Like the plots aren't capturing kids. And when I think about the most popular children's books today, I still think of "Harry Potter," which is going back two decades ago now, so, there hasn't been competition.

It's funny 'cause of course to me, "Harry Potter" seems really new. Still like, not really new, but.

But still late '90s, early 2000s.

Yeah, yeah, but it's, but it's no "Peter Pan."

Right.

It's no Victorian golden age kind of book.

Right, that's very true. So you published a book in 2019 called "The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction." What is the advantage of reading aloud today? We mentioned briefly the decline in reading, and I think often about the rise of audiobooks and podcasts, people wanna listen, but reading aloud, what does that mean for a parent and for a child?

Well, honestly, you can actually, there is enough about this to put it in an entire book, which I highly recommend-

Briefly.

my own work, obviously, I would say that, wouldn't I? But the truth is, there are all kinds of wonderful effects of reading aloud. And they don't just obtain when it's between a parent and a child, by the way, it could be an adult child and an older parent, it could be a husband and a wife, a teacher and an entire classroom. There is a kind of liberation that takes place when one person reads to another. There's a kind of almost supernatural connection. And in fact, neurologically, we know there are sort of, people who listen to the same story together, who experience the same story at the same time together, their brains essentially synchronize. So there's a very powerful sense of togetherness and unity, and there's a lot of emotional sort of closeness that comes from reading aloud. But there is also, I mean, really the virtues are almost numberless. There's also, it is a marvelous way to introduce complexity of syntax, of storyline and a vocabulary to young people who couldn't necessarily read books at that level on their own. So the great poet Dante said that the spoken word is our native tongue. And you can sort of see it, it sort of makes sense. I mean, listening to people speak is how we learn our language. Even dogs can learn some of our language if we speak to them. So when we're speaking to little children, we're inculcating in them the language that will be very easy for them, that they will be speaking later. It's easier for our brains to take in language through the ear, as it were, quite naturally. Learning to read is itself something of a challenge. It's not really natural, as Maryanne Wolf has said, "It's not really natural for the human brain to read." We really have to be taught to read, and it can be arduous and difficult, and not everybody gets there. I mean, not everybody can be a reader, not everyone's gonna be enjoying being a reader. A lot of children who struggle at school, the struggle actually originates in their difficulty reading. And if you can't learn to read for pleasure, then you miss out on all the opportunities for a sort of, I don't know, kind of emotional and artistic kind of soaring that you can do through literature. And that feeling of being seen and seeing yourself and feeling a deep human connection across time, that's all cut off to you if you can't read. But if somebody else reads to you, your brain can naturally take in language that it might not take in otherwise, story comes alive and compels you, and you get to experience literature at the same level as somebody who is much more adept at reading than you are. So this is one of the arguments, and it's in my book, for reading aloud to the whole classroom. In any classroom of students, call them like say 12-year-old middle schoolers or something, that awkward age, there'll be a handful who are super adept at reading, and they can just read anything, and they're probably reading way ahead of their grade level. And then there are a lot of children in the middle who maybe, eh, maybe they read, maybe they don't read, maybe they read graphic novels, comic books, whatever. And then there are the kids say academically at the bottom for whom literature is just a closed book, right? If they're called upon in class to analyze a paragraph or a sentence, it's just oppressive, it doesn't make any sense, they don't get it. I can understand this because that's me with math. I could never, just never made sense to me. Thank God literature did. But if the teacher reads aloud, then everyone in the class is getting the same story, the same rich language of writing, which is much richer than the language of spoken conversation, generally speaking, it's much more elevated language, more artful. Everybody in the class is getting it at the same time, and it has this wonderful buoying effect. And there are studies that prove me out on this, that actually children who are read to in school, they go soaring way ahead because it's such a wonderful contribution to sort of intellectual dynamism.

Right, it's also a rare period of uninterrupted focus, I imagine, in our digital age of constant distractions and shortened attention spans-

No, you're spot on there.

to have that moment of reading.

Yeah, you're spot on with that. What little children need, they need to hear us speaking to them. We need to be talking to children. And something I think I will take on later in the column is, I mean, I really do feel for young parents, but I see them. I mean, of course everyone has talked about the phenomenon of seeing children at a restaurant on an iPad, but it's deeper than that. There's a kind of broken connection between people's attention for the real world around them and the fantasy world, or the dopamine-delivering world of their phones. So it grieves me when I see young mothers with headphones on, sometimes talking to somebody else, pushing children in a stroller. Now, look, you can't be perfect all the time. If you're a parent, you try. You love your children, you're trying to do your best. But what you're missing out on is synchronizing with your child. What the child is missing out on is your attention, which for children, they just love it. Children just want their parents' attention. Young children anyway. Okay, middle school and upwards, maybe not so much attention, maybe they'd prefer not. And may I say, actually with older children, reading aloud is also extremely productive. It takes a different form, it's not necessarily, there's not so much sort of, as it were, educational quality to it. But it's a wonderful way to keep a parent-child bond going in those adolescent years when otherwise you might not have very much in common.

Hmm. What about the benefits for adults of reading? I think, again, in our digital age, it's so tempting to pick up your phone and wanna scroll through the news or look online on social media. Do you have any tips of how people can sit down with a book more often?

Look, look, Maryanne Wolf, who has written a lot about the neurology of the brain and reading and deep reading and its value for us as people, has herself admitted in, she wrote a wonderful book called "Reader, Come Home," probably in maybe 2018, something like that. She wrote about her own difficulty having been a great disciple of Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, William Shakespeare and such, herself having received great sustenance from these great writers, she wrote about how with the advent of devices, it took her about two weeks of solid effort to get back into reading. And this is a phrase I'm hearing a lot from younger people, "I wanna get back into reading." I think we're still at that point in history where we have enough people who still remember how it felt to be transported by a book. But if Maryanne Wolf has trouble, if it takes her two weeks, it also, I find I have to actually physically put my phone away in order to really go into into a novel. I mean, I'm a big reader, I read all the time, I read for work and I read for pleasure. I'm of that lucky cohort where it's still pretty much one of my favorite things to do. I think that James Baldwin said, and I'm gonna mangle this quotation, but the thing about literature is, you think you're alone and you think you're having a beastly experience that no other person has ever had. And then you read great literature and you discover that you have in common with people who have lived and died hundreds, possibly even thousands of years before you were born. They had the same experience, and so you are comforted. Now, that is not what James Baldwin said, but it's very close to that in gist. And I think that's really, that's the promise and the beauty. I mean, I myself, I also read literature for the pleasure of the language. I really enjoy the opposite word. For me, it's one of the delights of writing myself is I love to find, as the French say, just to find the exact right word. I really admire stylists like Kazuo Ishiguro, for instance. Very challenging author in some respects, but he never puts a word wrong. And neither, by the way, does Edith Wharton, she never puts a word wrong, just incredibly efficient, beautiful, artful storytelling.

So as a writer, what in the world inspires you to sit down and start writing a story? I'd love to know more about your process.

Well, story, well, hmm, my colleague Louise Perry said when she was in her conversation with you that she's writing all the time in her mind. And I think it's a little like that for me too. I will be, if I go for a walk, things almost just drop into my head, phrases, ideas, paragraphs. So I think I'm always writing at some level. One of the things I've really enjoyed in my career is writing, so I have no talent with fiction at all. I think this is, it's not so much well established as I am sure of it. I don't know about writing fiction, but I love the style of fiction. So I have really enjoyed taking episodes from my own experience and not so much turning them into fiction as turning 'em into a kind of reportage. So I just wrote recently for "Free Expression" about my imperfections as a longevity seeker, and the pleasure I get out of it, but also how completely weird it is to be part of that world. And so I would say, what's the old dictum, "Write what you know?" I can't claim really to know myself any more than the average person. But I do find I get a lot of pleasure out of observing, it sounds solipsistic, I don't mean it that way, but observing my own life, my own reactions to things, and then kind of extrapolating from that and looking at larger things. All of us are subject to fluctuating social norms. We participate in them whether we know or not. All of us are subject to fashions of one kind or another. We may have very strong principles in one, let's say religious principles or political principles that keep us from drifting away, but in other respects, we might find that we are suddenly going with the flow on something and we didn't really thought about it. So I think the experience of the individual does have something to teach about larger trends in the culture, which is always evolving.

Absolutely.

Yeah, so I really enjoy that. And for a long time, I had been a foreign correspondent, I worked overseas, and then I started having children. And once I had a couple of children, it was a little cumbersome to go traveling and whatnot, and also a little dangerous, not such a good idea. Maybe it began to occur to me that the point of my life was not necessarily my own professional fulfillment, I had other people now relying on me when I had children. But I did find the whole process of raising children surprising and delightful, like CS Lewis, I was surprised by joy. I was, I am, I was an only child from, well, my father used to joke, "An only child from a broken home." I had no brothers and sisters. I grew up kind of in a hippie-adjacent world back to the land in Maine. I have a memoir about that actually, which is hopefully coming out in the fall. More about that later. So I was sort of surprised by, I had no experience of babies and children really, other than having been one. Yeah. And so I found it was like something you could sort of almost turn your reporter's eye on your own life and get a lot of real enjoyment from writing about it and giving enjoyment to other people reading about it. And in doing so, I think, and this is something I'd like to help with, with the column for "Free Expression," help reinforce good norms. Some norms which are either under open assault or have fallen into desuetude, but which, as a conservative, as a lover of life and humanity. as a Christian, I would like to be helpful in propagating norms that make people happy and thrive.

Mary Julia: Go to wsj.com, find the Free Expression tab, and sign up for the newsletter today.