Remember that scene in the Adam Sandler movie ‘Big Daddy’ where Sonny gives six year old Julian the Victoria Secret catalogue to motivate him to read?

If you are the parent of a struggling reader, then chances are you sympathise with Sonny. When you have to fight with your child to get them to read on their own, sometimes you’ll try anything.

A baby shower invitation recently came in the mail asking invitees to bring books for the new baby. The invite included a poem that implied that if the baby had lots of books, she would surely grow up to be a reader. How cute; and, unfortunately, naive.

I have a houseful of books, a Master’s degree in creative writing and a seven year old who finds reading challenging.

One option to try motivating a reluctant reader, particularly if they are visual, is graphic novels.

Graphic novels are essentially more sophisticated, higher-end comic books. The level of literacy in the book really depends on the book.

Some of them have no words at all and require the child to tell the story. Others, such as the Owly series, use symbols to convey meaning. (However, if your child has issues with decoding they might still have some difficulty figuring out the meaning of the symbols. Letters and words, are, after all, symbols.) Up from this level, graphic novels for children can get a lot more complicated and wordy. Most graphic novels lean towards science fiction and fantasy.

When I was a child comic books were considered, by some to be the lowest order of reading. That view has to change. The advantage is that some children, particularly visual learners, need more visual cues and more visual stimulation to follow the story. The child can sit there and page through and get the general gist of the story on their own, or the child can read the story along with a more competent reader. The hope is that maybe, just maybe, the child will run their eyes over the words, while they are reading. There has, apparently, been some criticism that comic books and graphic novels, aren’t linear enough and the child can become confused about the order that sentences are arranged. We haven’t experienced this problem, but maybe it’s something to keep in mind.

The trouble with graphic novels is just finding them, particularly those written for children. I was recently at a big book store in England. They had a large section of graphic novels, but all of them were completely inappropriate. The only offering for children was Herge’s Tintin and Goscinny’s Asterix The Gaul.

“You have to go to France for graphic novels for children,” the bookstore lady said. “Over there they have a lot of that kind of thing.”

Later, it was revealed that the children’s book publisher, Scholastic, has a whole line of graphic novels for children under the label Graphix (www.scholastic.com/graphix/ ) . Amazon.com offers a few children’s graphic novels that are downloadable on Kindle, but the words tend to come out really small. The physical book is the best option in the case of graphic novels.