What Grown-Ups Can Learn From Kids’ Books

Reuters

By Maria Konnikova

An adult reflects on the valuable lessons of The Little Prince, Alice in Wonderland, and Winnie-the-Pooh.

My copy of Le Petit Prince looks like it has been through a natural disaster. Or two. The dust jacket is torn at every edge. What’s not torn is frayed. A piece of scotch tape holds together the é and r of Exupéry. The white background can’t really be called white anymore. And inside, little pencil markings lurk throughout the text (I would memorize passages when I was young), alongside evidence of attempted erasure—but you know how those old-school Number Two pencils are; all the erasers seem to do is leave things a little grayer than before. The book, in other words, has been well loved.

That’s not surprising. Most favorite children’s books are. But there’s one thing about mine that’s different: With the exception of those pesky eraser marks, the damage wasn’t sustained in childhood. Those are adult wounds.

The Little Prince is not alone to suffer that horrible fate: the designation of “children’s book” where it’s anything but, where it is actually far more worthy of an adult designation than many a so-called “adult” work. Leaving such books to childhood is a mistake of the worst kind. Fail to re-read them from a more mature standpoint and you’re almost guaranteed to miss what they’re all about.

To a child, The Little Prince is the story of a boy who falls from the sky, meets lots of funny people on his travels, and then returns to his star. But take a closer look and you find as clear a commentary on everything that’s wrong with modern life—and what can be done to fix it—as you would in the most biting social satire.

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Children’s books reflect harsh reality

Children’s books are now less likely to be along the lines of Alice in Wonderland, and instead reflect the harsh reality of modern childhood. Photograph: Buyenlarge/Getty

Abandonment, alienation and homelessness are increasingly the themes covered in modern literature for children.

By Amelia Hill

There was no place like home for Dorothy in the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Max returned to his “still warm” dinner in the classic Maurice Sendak tale, Where the Wild Things Are. But an analysis of award-winning children’s literature has identified a dramatic change in the stories being told to young people today, where there is no yellow brick road to follow, the wild things are in the child’s real home and there are no hot meals.

Modern books are more likely to feature children who are abandoned, alienated and have no home to return to, than characters who voluntarily set off on adventures, according to Professor Kathy Short, president of the International Board of Books for Young People.

“For these children, childhood is not the happy, carefree time it is ‘supposed’ to be,” said Short. “Children don’t leave home on a lark. They are thrust out. These children are not wild things. They are too busy taking care of their troubled parents to have time to follow a rabbit down a hole; too frightened of abuse to trust the Tinman, and too fearful to set out on an adventure for fear that their unreliable parent might not be there when they return.

“These children have been caught in the crossfire of the gender, race, class and culture clashes between adults,” she added. “Like all people in the postmodern world, children are confronted with multiple competing truths and a lack of absolutes.”

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Charles Dodgson’s Alice

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On this day in 1862, while rowing on the Thames at Oxford, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) began to tell the three Liddell sisters the story that would become Alice in Wonderland. Alice, the ten-year-old middle sister, was so taken with the improvised story that she badgered Dodgson to complete it; when he had it done two and a half years later he presented it to her, with his own illustrations and bound in leather, as a Christmas gift.
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