Celebrating empty shelves

By Noel Galon de Leon

It is embarrassing that we continue to celebrate National Children’s Book Month while so many Filipino children still grow up without a single book to read or even hold in their hands.

Every July, the Philippines celebrates National Children’s Book Month through storytelling sessions, book exhibits, writing workshops, seminars, and other literacy activities. Spearheaded by the Philippine Board on Books for Young People in partnership with the National Book Development Board and other institutions, the celebration aims to cultivate a love for reading among children and strengthen Philippine children’s literature. The goals are admirable. The programs are meaningful. Yet every year, as the number of events, posters, and commemorative photographs grows, I cannot help but ask whether we are truly celebrating children’s books or simply decorating a reality we have long refused to confront.

We already know that reading is essential to a child’s development. Teachers, parents, writers, publishers, and government agencies have repeated this truth for decades. There is no longer any serious debate about the importance of early literacy. The real question is far more uncomfortable. Do children actually have books to read?

According to the National Baseline Survey on Early Childhood Development conducted by the Council for the Welfare of Children, approximately six out of every ten Filipino households with children aged zero to four do not own a single children’s book. This alarming finding also serves as the foundation of the Council for the Welfare of Children’s “Booksan ang Kinabukasan” campaign, which encourages the public to donate children’s books to families with little or no access to reading materials.

Six out of ten households. That is not merely a statistic. It represents millions of children growing up without bedtime stories, without books to spark their earliest curiosity, and without the quiet but transformative experience that reading can provide.

Whenever I encounter findings like these, I cannot deny that they leave me discouraged. As someone who has spent years working on literacy and children’s literature initiatives, I often wonder whether our literary festivals, reading campaigns, and educational seminars are enough. It is not because these efforts lack value. It is because their impact remains painfully limited when books never reach the homes of the children who need them most.

My understanding of this reality deepened during the pandemic through one of our community projects, “Sari-sari Bookstore sa Barangay”. The project aimed to bring affordable and high quality children’s books directly into local communities. Time and again, parents confessed something they had never fully realized before. They did not know that their homes contained no children’s books. When schools were open, children had reading corners. When libraries were accessible, books could be borrowed. When bookstores operated normally, families could occasionally afford to buy a book. But when everything shut down during the pandemic, one painful truth became impossible to ignore. There were simply no books waiting for children at home.

Even purchasing books online was not an easy solution. Deliveries often took weeks to arrive. In many cases, shipping costs exceeded the price of the book itself. For families struggling to stretch every peso, children’s books became a luxury instead of an essential educational resource.

This is precisely why celebrating National Children’s Book Month is not enough. It is not enough to fill social media with photographs of smiling children listening to storytellers if those same children return home without a single book of their own. It is not enough to publish award winning children’s books when many of the children who need them most will never have the opportunity to read them.

Perhaps it is also time to ask who our book initiatives actually reach. Too often, they remain concentrated in schools, museums, universities, conference halls, shopping malls, and cultural centers. These spaces are important, but they do not represent the entire country. Children living in remote barangays, island communities, evacuation centers, or relocation sites rarely have access to these venues. If we truly want to build a nation of readers, we cannot expect children to come to books. Books must go to where children are.

As we observe National Children’s Book Month this July, I hope we move beyond symbolic celebrations. A single month of literacy events cannot compensate for twelve months during which many children never open a book. Government institutions must step outside their traditional spaces and invest in community libraries, mobile libraries, book donation networks, barangay reading centers, and programs that deliver books directly to children’s homes. Books should be treated as part of our nation’s educational and social infrastructure, not merely as decorative symbols during literacy campaigns.

The greatest obstacle to reading is not children’s unwillingness to read. It is that far too many of them have nothing to read. Perhaps that is the saddest children’s story our nation continues to write.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and professor at the University of the Philippines Visayas, where he teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He is also the Secretary of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts-National Committee on Literary Arts.