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Banned Books Week: Children’s Books and the End of Innocence

 

Something I see a lot in arguments about whether kids should have access to a particular book is that, as parents and guardians of children, we want to protect their innocence. If you live in a middle class family that was relatively intact, in an area where everyone seemed to be pretty much like you, controlling your kids’ reading might help to preserve that innocence for a while, but if you take a closer look at the individual families there, what you see is that under the surface, children have already faced, or learned about, some pretty terrible things. Even at school, they’ve faced lockdown drills, practice for what to do if the school is invaded by a shooter. The terrible things we live among are so commonplace, and many of us are so numb to them, that it may be difficult for adults to realize how affected some of our kids really are.

I was in the library with my daughter, who is a huge fan of the 43 Old Cemetery Road books and was looking for something similar. The librarian kept making suggestions and asking questions: is this one too dark? Are you looking for something scary, or something funny, or both? I can’t remember what it was the librarian pulled off the shelf that I looked at and said “I think that one might be too dark and scary for her”. My daughter put her hands on her hips, looked at me with exasperation, and said “Mom, my dad died. Nothing is sadder or scarier than that”.  Okay, then. Keeping kids away from the media doesn’t preserve their innocence. Fiction is a safer place than fact. And let me tell you, there is a lot of scary stuff, and a lot of death, in children’s fiction. Even Little Women spends a lot of time on death.

Children’s writing has gotten a lot edgier today, so I can see where some of the discomfort comes from, but we are living in an uncomfortable world. It is a scary place. We can respect that our kids are dealing with a lot of the same things that make the world a scary place for us, and help them choose the reading material they want, or maybe even need, in hopes that even scary books will give them a space in their lives for hope.

If a kid doesn’t think he’s ready to read a scary book, there’s time yet. And certainly there are choices that need to be made about what’s developmentally appropriate: for instance, most Holocaust fiction is not recommended for elementary students (the one exception I can think of is The Devil’s Arithmetic) but if you take your kids to The Sound of Music, you are going to have to come up with a reasonable explanation of who the Nazis were. But that means having dialogue with your child about that, not making choices for him or others to protect his innocence. For a lot of kids, that innocence just isn’t there anymore. Taking books out of their hands can’t save that. Talking to kids about them can help a lot.

For a partial list of banned children’s books, from picture books through Young Adult, go here.

Posted on October 2, 2015 by , Reply

Children’s Books and the Presence of Death

 

“The first thing you do is kill off the parents”. It’s a standard beginning to many stories for and about children. Parents want to protect their children, and for the main character to start on his or her journey, and overcome obstacles independently, the parents have to go.

Sometimes the parents are just absent, out of selflessness, or self-centeredness, or fear.  Percy Jackson’s mother sends him away to prevent monsters from finding him; Ella, from Gail Carson Levine’s Ella Enchanted, is left behind while her merchant father travels; Medusa, in the Goddess Girls books, is totally neglected by her parents because, unlike her sisters, she is mortal. And sometimes their absence helps to drive the story:  in A Wrinkle in Time, Meg and Charles Wallace travel through space and time to rescue their father; and without the sacrifice Harry Potter’s parents make to save him, he wouldn’t be The Boy Who Lived.  It’s hard to tell a story about growing up without exploring both love and loss.

Adults worry a lot about fantasy violence– battles against mythical monsters or in unbelievable worlds. But the key word there is “unbelievable”.  R.L. Stine has said that when he writes for children he makes sure that there is no way they will carry over their fears into believing that what has happened in the books could take place in real life. When a gifted writer immerses us in intense emotions, it’s much more powerful, and sometimes scarier than anything supernatural.

Children’s literature is filled with death and violence– it’s inescapable. As adults who love children and want to protect them, and who want to share our love of reading, that can be really hard for us to handle.  But I think it’s really important that we trust kids to tell us what they can handle. It’s really wrenching to read some of these books with my kids right now. It’s honestly the books that aren’t marketed as horror, or even scary, that make a real emotional impact. The Monster Kid won’t stay in the room if there’s any kind of realistic death that takes place in a book, although the mayhem in the Percy Jackson books doesn’t bother him, and he’s a fan of Goosebumps. His sister sobbed through parts of Ella Enchanted after Ella’s mother died, but insisted I keep going. Tiffany Aching’s long meditations on her grandmother’s death, in The Wee Free Men, didn’t touch her as deeply. Upon learning that the parents of the main character die at the beginning of The Secret Garden, though, she decided to pass. We’ll get there someday, when she’s ready.

As uncomfortable as it can be to share some stories, it’s a great disservice to developing the reading life of a child to completely avoid the darkness. The kids already know it’s there.

 

Image credit: Through the door to The Secret Garden. From The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Posted on March 28, 2015 by , 2 comments

The Tenth Good Thing About Barney: Reading Aloud With a Child

I have been doing a little academic research into children’s literature and horror recently, and one of the things I’ve seen mentioned multiple times is that children’s literature is different that any other kind, because it’s really written with adults in mind. Let me explain.

It’s mostly adults who write children’s books. Adults decide what books are appropriate for publication for children, edit them, and market them. Adults are the ones who usually buy them. And adults decide how and where they should be made available. Many children’s books are written well beyond the capacity of  the child to read the book independently… so most children’s books, for many years, are also read by, or with adults, to children.

As adults, we have too much of a past to experience a children’s book in the same way a child does, and our roles in the present also change the way we look at them. And that affects the reading experience children have when we read aloud with them.

My mom bought a book containing a variety of stories meant for reading aloud with a child. It’s a strange collection, really, and includes The Shrinking of Treehorn by Florence Parry Heide and The Magic Finger by Roald Dahl. My five year old daughter pulled this book out, opened it to the middle and said “I want this one.” She had chosen The Tenth Good Thing About Barney, a picture book by Judith Viorst about a boy grieving for his cat, who has just died. It’s often recommended for use with children when talking about death. Not really a feel good bedtime story. Even though I’ve never had a cat, I tear up at the end. I said, “This is a very sad story. Are you sure you want me to read it?” She did. And so I read it to her. And for her it wasn’t sad. She made a connection between Barney, the cat in the story, and Picky-picky, Ramona Quimby’s cat (in Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books), who dies in the movie, but she wasn’t sad. And the next night at bedtime she wanted it again. And so did her brother. I warned him that it could be sad, but he still wanted to hear it, so I read it again. And it wasn’t sad for him. As an adult who knows how this book is supposed to be used, I didn’t really feel the need for my kids to hear the story. As a mom, I was afraid it would make them sad, and maybe scared, so that it would be hard to go to sleep. And I have heard a few questions about cats and about death in the last day or so, but nothing that seems to make them sad, or scared, or worried. Keeping it away from them because of my own worries, fears, and preconceptions seems, in this case, like it would have been kind of selfish. They don’t appear to have been damaged by the experience, and maybe it has made their lives richer. I think that goes for a lot of books that people worry about putting in the hands of children. I am glad that I didn’t say more than that this was a sad story. Even that gives them a frame that is not their own for understanding what the story means for them.

Reading aloud to children, and with children, is a joy, a pleasure, and sometimes a frustration. And it’s also a responsibility, not just as adults reading for thirty minutes at night with them so they’ll grow up to be independent readers with a love of stories and books (or at least children who can pass the I-READ exam). It is a responsibility, because by what we choose to share and how we feel about children’s books, as adults, as professionals, and as former children, we have the ability to change the way our children see and feel about a book that so very many adults wanted to put into their hands. Once it’s in their hands, though, children can change the book for us, as well.  Reading aloud  with a child alters the world. That’s something to keep in mind.

 

Posted on January 8, 2013 by , Reply
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