Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
Could scary books be necessary for kids' development?
by Liza Featherstone
April 6, 2009
But protecting kids from psychic discomfort may not be good for them. "Is it important for children to experience novel or unusual emotions?" asks Charuvastra. Maybe so: By requesting the same alarming story over and over, a child is mastering his fears about death, punishment and scary animals, all of which are part of real life. Scary books are a kind of play therapy. "The importance of bad things in stories is that they help create pretend space where bad things can happen," says Dr. Charuvastra. "It's better for your child to experience these feelings for the first time with you, in pretend space, than in non-pretend space." Indeed, this ability, observes Charuvastra, "to flip back and forth between pretend and reality, to take a step back and say, this is pretend, in my head," is a skill that many adults never learn, unless we enter cognitive therapy as patients. So a child reading In the Night Kitchen may be developing critical inner resources.
Of course, we don't want children to read just because it's psychologically healthy. We want them to enjoy great literature because it's one of life's most exhilarating pleasures. As with grown-up fiction, the less comforting the material, the more artful it usually is. A recent exhibition on Babar at New York City's Morgan Library, which displayed Jean de Brunhoff's original sketches, made clear that of all his illustrations, the scene depicting the mother's violent death was the one on which he'd worked hardest, through many drafts. Originally, that moment opened The Story of Babar, as if to get the unpleasantness out of the way, but then he decided instead to begin with scenes of mother-infant bliss and childhood innocence — baby Babar falling asleep with his mother, then playing with his friends in the sand — a choice that made the death scene much sadder, and in a literary sense, far more profound.
Scary books are a kind of play therapy.
Children, like adults, like literature that helps them make sense of their own lives. "Kids have earth-shattering experiences, then they have dinner and go to bed!" says Sarah Curtis, who is now a first-grade teacher at Brooklyn's famously cerebral St. Ann's School. She is conducting a William Steig retrospective with her class, reading each of his books aloud. His stories resonate, she thinks, because they reflect young children's inner experience of their daily lives. "In most of Steig's books," she explains, "the hero — a child or an animal — is facing death and other existential questions, huge and thrilling. The books always culminate in a quiet moment: the hero tells his parents all about his adventure, then they all have dinner and go to bed."
Of course, young children don't just want to read these complicated, strange stories, Curtis points out. They also love simple books that allow them to master interesting information about say, animals, or trucks. And of course, they love outrageously silly books like Mo Willems's Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus or I Stink! But parents — and the publishing industry — shouldn't deprive kids of children's literature's darker side.
Usually Ivan wants to read Babar the King in its entirety. But sometimes, he wants to read only one particular scene, always a terrifying one. "Read the part about the snake bite," he commanded the other day. "Why do you like that part so much?" I asked. "Because," he said, seeming surprised by the question, "it's not real."
©2009 Liza Featherstone and Babble Media
About the Author
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Liza Featherstone is a contributing writer to The Nation. Her work has appeared in Nerve, Salon, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Teen Vogue and NYLON. She's the author of Selling Women Short: The Landmark Battle for Workers' Rights at Wal-Mart (Basic Books, 2004). She lives in New York City with her husband and son. |
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