I remember a particular day a number of years ago when I was in the library looking for childrens’ books. My children were at the age where books needed to have lots of pictures and not too many words to be interesting.
As I looked through I realized “Hey, all I’m looking for is good stories. What is it with all these books that have ‘agendas’?” It seemed to me that the UK books did a little better at simply being ‘a great story’ than the US ones but that could have been because only the best British books made it across the Atlantic.
This is what I mean by ‘agendas’. There were lots of “I have a new baby brother” books. Agenda? To help a child adjust to having a new sibling. A great many of the books were like this – they had a message they were trying to get across, first and foremost. They weren’t imaginative or funny or any of the things I was hoping for. I was thankful and relieved whenever I ran across books like Kipper whose only agenda I could detect was to be silly.
I was reminded of this yesterday because I took my daughter to a ‘meet the author’ event. My daughter was intrigued by a book of hers all written in instant messages. We were about to buy it a few days ago then we noticed the author was going to be at the store yesterday. So we went back then instead, to meet the author and get a signed copy of the book.
The author read a passage from a book about a twelve year old girl. The whole passage was about this girl’s angst that she’d reached the stage of physical development where her Mom said “We need to get you a bra”.
I was thinking “Who’d read that?” and I was glad to find out afterwards that my daughter came away with no interest in reading that book.
So here again is a story with an agenda – this part evidently is intended to help girls see that it’s normal to have all sorts of feelings about changing physically.
Whether these stories are for preschoolers or teenagers I think they have subverted the point of story, which is to capture the readers imagination and take him/her new places. Story is intended to open up the world. I think these books shut it down. By implication they tell children “when this happens, you will have negative feelings about it”. In reality each child is unique and reacts to situations differently.
If a child does feel anxious or afraid, is a book going to resolve that? I doubt it. I think what will work is having friends and older people who have been through it, who understand, who the children can process it with. These other people, because they know the child, don’t have to presuppose a problem. They can wait and see if it actually arises, then deal with it.
I’d like to get back to where stories are stories, not attempted therapy in written form.