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it can offer. Parents are often the first facilitators of the literary experience among children through the practice of reading stories aloud. This practice has been valued in the past because of its potential to develop in children a liking for stories, and in later years, for reading in general. Parents in Australia continue to read to their children, although disappointingly, in the Australia Council's survey of reading trends (2005), only 41.2 per cent of parents were found to be reading to young children on a daily basis.

The response of parents to the Harry Potter books has been overwhelming. As the Daily Telegraph critic writes, "The Harry Potter books are that rare thing, a series of stories adored by parents and children alike." If these books are fostering motivation for parents and children to enjoy stories together, and in those stories the forces of good overcome the forces of evil, then how dangerous can they be? Far more threatening is the tendency for life's clamour to overtake parents' time and energies, so that children are not being given the attention and interaction they deserve at story-time.

Critics of J. K. Rowling are doing a disservice to children as readers in that they have assumed that the child is a sponge, empty and absorbent, ready to acquire by osmosis any new idea they encounter. This view does not take into account the possibility that children may be competent to analyse new ideas, and accept or reject them on the basis of their own experience, however limited. The engaging qualities of the Harry Potter books may present intellectual challenges, stir memories, provoke questions, and require the adjustment of pre-established mind-sets to accommodate new ideas, or to reject them. If a child finds a book too scary, they will stop reading it. If the morality represented in the book conflicts with theirs, they can choose to reject it, or discuss it and perhaps rethink the views which they may have adopted out of hand.

Children's fiction typically requires the reader to side with the protagonist against the force that poses the situation of conflict. A writer leading the reader to this level of engagement with a protagonist will be in a strong position to convey a powerful theme, as the protagonist acts as the object of the reader's emotional response. Rowling's focus in the series is upon bringing her reader to a sense of personal identification with an ordinary boy with an unhappy home life. His initial powerlessness is a feeling

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