A ‘normal’ childhood

In which cultures were, or are, children seen in the following ways?

1. children are impressive if they can tie their own shoelaces by the age of four
2. girls are expected to knit stockings by the age of four
3. children are treated with leniency because they cannot reason
4. children are treated harshly  because they are wilful
5. children are recent arrivals from the spirit world, and must be treated carefully so they don’t choose to return there
6. children are dependent
7. children contribute to family work and income
8. girls are running the house by age 10 whereas their brothers are allowed to play well into their teens.

Match them to these periods / cultures:  Yanamamo (Amazonian rainforest), Fulani (West Africa),   UK,  Beng (West Africa), Tonga, Canadian Arctic, current Western, American Colonial.

Answers here,  in an item written by our very own Dr Heather Montgomery. Of course, in practice you might see cultures, periods and expectations as more elastic than this.

Edit: then again, what is a ‘normal’ parent? In current Young Adult fiction, according to the New York Times:

some of the most sharply written and critically praised works reliably feature a mopey, inept, distracted or ready-for-rehab parent, suggesting that this has become a particularly resonant figure.

Reader response

Try this rewarding reflection by AS Byatt on how she remembers some of the books she read as a child.  For me, she captures some of the ‘childness’ in these books, and what a child may take from them. I’ve pulled out some plums.

On Alices’ Adventures in Wonderland:

The texture of reading Alice is a series of linguistic puzzles, contradictions and jokes… [Alice's] main emotion is trying to make sense against increasing odds.

Peter Pan, Treasure Island (among others):

Children in these books have a kind of emotional and moral autonomy which is new in literature. The child reader feels their problems, decisions and dangers differently from those of either children in real fairy stories (Hansel and Gretel) or children in novels who will grow up – Pip in terror by his parents’ gravestone,  Oliver Twist in the orphanage, David Copperfield tormented by the Murdstones, Jane Eyre in the Red Room, or furious, sulky Maggie Tulliver.

On The Secret Garden:

One of the most moving orphans is Mary in The Secret Garden… My childish responses to Mary’s attempts to make sense of the world were the opposite to my response to Alice. I felt protective towards her and, at the same time, I did see the world from inside her. I was embarrassed with and for her…Yet her own cussedness and capacity for tantrums turn out to be a strength when she meets the cosseted and neglected invalid Colin, another self-centred child- seen by the reader, I think, through Mary’s eyes as she hectors  him into ordinary life.

On The Wizard of Oz:

… Dorothy does not have much character – less than her three companions who nevertheless provide no niche for the reader’s imaginiation to hang on to… What is splendid about Oz is the detail of things – yellow bricks, emerald glasses, oilcans.

On Treasure Island:

[Jim's] is a first-person narrative, which is as often distancing as it is involving. But the smells, the fear, the effort, the attempt to read strange and dangerous faces, or deceptively mild ones, become part of one’s own consciousness…

Fear goes with evil beings, and with dangerous landscapes. Blind Pew, and smiling, treacherous Long John Silver taught me much about fear, about the possibility of real danger.

In particular, as we are currently focusing on illustration, read her comments about Disneyfication, and the one Disney film which for her did not kill the power of the original:

…Snow White.. added considerably to my experience of wonderful fear and terror, even though its heroine was a doll. This, I have been told, was because it was made by German refugees who had a sense of the darkness of the old stories.

Not referenced, not real?

Half of children don’t read fiction, reports The Daily Telegraph today. The headline is based on  ‘a study by the National Literacy Trust (NLT)’.  Unfortunately I can’t track it down on the NLT website.

The article claims:

Children are now more likely to look at websites and emails for their leisure reading than pick up a book, according to the survey of their reading habits.

The information isn’t much use on its own – how much ‘more likely’ to read websites than books? Very much more likely than last year? Or than five years ago? Well,  inevitably more than 20 years ago! But is this actually crowding out fiction reading?

Little more than four in 10 boys (42 per cent) regularly open the pages of a work of fiction, while among girls the proportion is only marginally higher, at 48 per cent.

If  at least four out of ten children DO ‘regularly open the pages of  a work of fiction’, is that better or worse than previously?  What age groups?

The article then slides across into a a smattering of other research findings, broadly suggesting that it is Good Thing  for children to be read stories,  and a Bad Thing for teenagers to surf at the expense of sustained reading.

Who could quarrel with that?  But…  I can certainly be persuaded that literacy is not what it was. For one thing, children have to learn how to cope with and evaluate the internet, just as they have to cope with and evaluate other resources.   This article looks to me rather like another ‘construction of childhood’ – instead of sitting in the barn with apples and books to sustain them like Jo March, our children are being sucked into their computer screens. I suspect we need a more  complicated, and more precisely research-verified, approach. I’m off back to the National Literacy Trust research news page.

More representations of childhood

I’m a bit late with this little bit of prompting – you’re masters of this topic by now, and my links below date back to 2006.  But it’s a fascinating area for children’s literature.

Trying to identify how authors imagine or represent childhood can involve scrutinising texts for their Puritan, Enlightenment, Romantic, gendered, socially stratified, imperial, colonial, and no doubt all sorts of other, ideologies. Including – delightfully and most productively – some ambiguous and even subversive views of those ideologies.

But it’s a bit harder to see what’s going on in relation to our own times. What are modern times doing to our view of childhood?

Is our culture toxic to childhood, as 110 experts claimed in a letter to The Telegraph? Or is that just typical older generation panic?*

*My thanks to the OUSA EA300 student forum for these links.

Choose your family

Here’s a thought-experiment about ideas of childhood and growing up. If you found yourself wandering lost among children’s literature, orphaned and alone, which literary family would you choose?

Do we all want to be Weasleys? Freedom to be yourself, unconditional love, excitement and fun, with the prospect of growing up into a responsible adult with decent values.

I don’t want to stay with Peter Pan – there’s no growth (though I kind of like the idea of no weight…)  Wendy’s childhood is playful but she has to cope with a lot of nonsense from John about boys being better. I really don’t want to camp out with the Swallows or the Amazons – my imagination wouldn’t take me past the discomforts (yes, I’m a duffer); couldn’t abide Tom and his brother Peter as siblings or their stifling ordinariness (too much like my own); Cassie’s family have it tough and  Mama and Papa dole out punishment too.  Lyra’s guardians allow her an enchanting freedom but she doesn’t seem to be much cared for…

Representations of childhood

“Each generation remakes the idea of being young“  At the link* is an overview of ideas about childhood, by Prof Hugh Cunningham of the University of Kent. He writes about the Victorian period:

Children, it came to be thought, should be protected from the adult world of work and responsibility. They should be dependent on adults, and their time divided between home and school. And ideally they should be happy, a state of happiness coming to be particularly associated with childhood. Right at the end of the period Peter Pan wanted never to grow up.

Things have shifted in the 2003 Hogan film version,  where the focus is much more on Wendy’s adolescent drive to grow up.  I quite liked the soppy spiralling to the skies scene to romantic music – brought down to earth with a bump when Peter insists that it is just play.  But really I could hardly wait for the film to end.

I’m with Maurice Sendak – ‘the wish is to get out [of childhood]‘ , as adolescence kicks in anyway.

What about younger generations?  Extended education, financial difficulties keeping young people at home with parents longer, the popularity of games and entertainment: are these signs of different patterns of ‘growing up’?

*Edit – the link wasn’t working. Sorry. It should be ok now.

When Uncles and Aunts were the Wild Things

“Where the Wild Things Are” : book,  animated short, children’s opera, film, video game,  and oh dear  novelisation. Are we in the process of seeing it become a modern fairy tale: scary, weird, and thoroughly commoditised?

To the flurry of discussion about whether the film is suitable for children (see here for instance), the book’s author has given a robust response:

What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?
Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.

Because kids can handle it?
Sendak: If they can’t handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like. But it’s not a question that can be answered.

But in an  interview recorded back in 1986 with America’s National Public Radio, Sendak said of his book:  ‘children are not afraid of them [the monsters] because Max is not afraid of them.’

I thought the interview made fascinating listening. Sendak had a sickly childhood, relatively unprotected by immigrant parents who were themselves vulnerable, but even so he was surely not completely unusual in finding adults ‘awful.. mostly dreadful’ and that ‘being a child was even worse… a creature without power, without pocket money, or escape routes’. He saw Peter Pan and detested it as sentimental – ‘The wish is to get out [of childhood]‘. He denies that his books have morals – he seeks to amuse, entertain, distract.

As a child, he himself was terrified of the vacuum cleaner (the way that bag inflated..) and of the Invisible Man because how could you be reassured that he wasn’t actually there? He recalls his childhood perspective: those Uncles and Aunts, seen with a child’s eye, are potential monsters. They say things like ‘How big you are, how fat you’ve got, we could eat you up.’ And how ugly the relatives are! Children can be ‘monstrously cruel about physical defects.’

And if all this doesn’t scare you,  try taking a look at the Wild Things  fashion collection.

Literature for children or for adults?

In Block 1 week 2 of our course, students are asked to think about what defines or characterises children’s literature.

Co-incidentally,  a book has been submitted for a children’s book prize that is also raising this issue. The National Book Foundation (’60 Years of Honoring Great American Books’) 2009 shortlist is here.  Here’s a summary of  discussion (controversy seems too strong a word) from a US blog:

Since these finalists were announced yesterday, people have been wondering how STITCHES — conceived of and published as a book for adults — ended up in this category. Is it because David Small is best known as a creator of children’s books? Because the “graphic novel” style resembles a book for young readers rather than adults? Because this autobiography mostly concerns Small’s childhood and teenage years? From what I’ve read on the net today, STITCHES was nominated for the youth award because that’s the category in which Norton, the book’s publisher, submitted it. That’s funny…they published it as an adult book.

None of these reasons seem particularly relevant, do they? But, for us, a very relevant conundrum!