What’s missing from children’s books? Earnest messages about the evils of bullying and the importance of tolerance? Stories that build sensitivity for other cultures and races? Books that inculcate a sense of history?
Not according to children’s author Ted Dewan. In Dewan’s mind there’s one thing missing from most kids’ books: violence.
Dewan notes that children, and boys in particular, often produce violent images in their own artwork, but these images rarely make it into kidlit. To redress this, Dewan’s new book, One True Bear, will include pictures, drawn by children, of images “that don’t get put up on the fridge.” The BBC reports that “[t]hese primary school children’s line drawings include battlefield scenes, planes dropping bombs, people shooting each other, tanks, someone impaled on a spike, buildings on fire and a clown with limbs pulled off.” The article continues:
It’s not some kind of Tarantino for toddlers. It’s a moral tale of how a self-sacrificing teddy bear wins the affections of a violent boy. The bear’s gruff generosity redeems the angry youngster. And almost all the illustrations are soothingly traditional, with these grittier images kept in the background.
Dewan’s book will no doubt elicit a flurry of objections from well-meaning parents wishing to shelter their children from the psychological effects of violent images. But according to Michael Thompson, the American author of Raising Cain: The Emotional Life of Boys, these fears are unfounded:
“There is no connection between writing violent stories and committing violence. If you write violent stories, you are not going to end up in jail, you are going to end up in Hollywood writing action movies.”
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[...] no word yet about an adaptation of One True Bear, which might make for an interesting property should Eli Roth ever decide to branch out into [...]
While I’m not a big fan of violence in children’s books, it reminds me of when I first read Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio which portrayed the violence of physical abuse with illustrations of Jiminy the Cricket being stepped on and slammed against the wall, and the image of Pinocchio hanging from a tree was burned in my brain. Then I watched the real version of The Little Mermaid where she killed herself in the ocean. And I grew up with the Brothers Grimm. The difference was I had parents who read them with me so that I could discuss what I was seeing. As a former preschool teacher I think in this day and age parents need to step up to the plate and make decisions with or for their children. Are they going to offer a sanitized version of a story or one that will create a forum for discussion and creativity? I vote for discussion. Find out what they think. What they have to say is so important to having them understand what a moral tale is really about.
[...] is precisely what author Ted Dewan thinks is missing from today’s children’s books. Quill & Quire tells us that his upcoming book One True Bear “will include pictures, drawn by children, of [...]