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1.1 The Benefits of Children's Literature

Imagine what it must be like to be a newborn: You've left a world of warmth, comfort, and consistency and have been thrust into a place of unpredictable noises, bright lights, and comparatively rough handling. The regular heartbeat and soft sounds of the liquid environment that has enveloped you for the past nine months are suddenly gone, replaced by electronic beeps, sharp bangs and clangs, and loud and unfamiliar voices.

Remarkably, newborn infants do have some resources to cope with the strange environment in which they find themselves. Neurotypical infants can track a brightly colored ball as it passes in front of their eyes, and they can recognize a human face. If their hearing is functional, they will respond to a familiar voice, preferring a voice whose music they have heard while in the womb. They have instincts for sucking and vocalizing that prompt responses from adults. Thus, they already have many of the tools they need to begin the long process of ordering, understanding, interacting with, and manipulating their world.

However, as neuroscientists are quick to point out, all human infants are born prematurely, meaning that despite the nine months of development in the womb, the human brain and body still have a long way to go in terms of developing neural connections and pathways that coordinate both thinking and moving. To become fully human, infants need to learn how to use language the way other people in their culture do, how to read and interpret images and gestures, how to regulate their emotions and behaviors, how to communicate with others and take up a meaningful place in that culture as individuals, how to find out things they don't know, and how to participate in community activities and rituals.

This is where children's literature comes in. Through storytelling, poetry, song, and printed texts, children learn how their culture is organized, what it values, how it differs from other cultures, how they can both assert and develop their individuality, and how they can become valued and responsible members of a community.

That seems like a lot of weight to put on children's books, which on the surface may seem simple, sentimental, or sometimes even silly. But throughout this book, we will explore the richness of the interaction between children and quality literature. Children's literature, through its forms, its messages, and the conversations it inspires, helps children understand the complex world they have entered. It expands their capacity to enjoy that world by providing pleasure. It may even help them change their world by stimulating their imaginations and developing their intellects.

Consider, for instance, the picturebook Swimmy (1963), by Leo Lionni. Swimmy is the lone black fish in a school of red ones. Besides being a different color, he is also a faster swimmer than his fellow fish, which is why he alone escapes on that fateful day when the rest of his brothers and sisters are swallowed up by a larger fish. After the loss of his family, he swims around the ocean and meets many wonderful and unique creatures, but he is lonely for his own kind. When he meets up with a new school of small red fish, he joins them and teaches them that together they can camouflage themselves in such a way as to scare off big fish—they mass into a big fish shape themselves, with Swimmy as their black eye.

As children enjoy this story of a small fish who uses his intelligence and his physical difference to solve a problem, they learn many things about the social organization of their world. They learn, for instance, that big fish eat small ones and that this is a problem for small fish. They learn that being different can be hard but that it has its rewards. They learn that the world is full of strange and mysterious things that are worth finding out about. And finally, they learn that working together can save them from danger. These messages are similar to other Lionni books, which often feature characters whose difference and special qualities are essential to the success of the group. As children grow, they will face many pressures to talk, act, and think like everyone else, but Swimmy is accepted for who he is because the group recognizes that they need him to be and think differently than they. His story expresses a core cultural value of accepting and honoring individual differences.

Different books offer different messages about a range of cultural values. Sometimes, these messages are explicit and easy to understand. Often, though, they are subtle, and child readers absorb them unconsciously as they enjoy the story. One of the reasons it is important for parents, professional caregivers, and early childhood educators to study children's literature is because children's literature always teaches children something about the world, and we need to be aware of what those lessons are. Because children have limited experience with the world around them, and because their brains are so active in taking in new information and making connections, they are remarkably open to both the overt and the subtle messages embedded in the stories we share.

1.2 What Do Children's Literature Researchers Study?

There are many ways to go about the study of children's literature. Literary researchers, for instance, study the literature itself. They might look at books, folk stories, poems, and films from a historical perspective, asking why certain stories and poems become classics. Alternately, they might look at form, that is, how the art and the words of children's books invite children to read them, and how those forms have changed over time. Still other literary researchers focus on the messages of children's literature, as we just did with Swimmy, to try to determine how these messages are communicated to children through their books. They call these sorts of messages ideologies, which are the unconscious beliefs and values that underlie our behavior. Our cultural beliefs and values seem like common sense to us, when really they have been taught to us through various means, including children's literature, throughout our lifetimes.

Scholars in the fields of Education and Library and Information Sciences focus more on the interaction of children with books. They want to know how to get children to engage with books so that they can meet educational and personal goals and enrich their lives through reading. Educators understand that children acquire literacy and literary understanding in stages, and they research how engagement with literature helps children progress through these stages. Librarians are committed to a practice they call a readers' advisory, which aims to put the right book in the right person's hand at the right time. In order to help children engage with books, teachers and librarians need to understand something about children's preferences as well as have a broad knowledge of what sorts of books are available.

1.3 What Will You Study About Children's Literature in This Book?

This book will introduce strategies from all of these different ways of looking at children's literature, which includes not only printed books, but also oral stories and poems, music, film, and digital media. In Chapter 2, you will see how the history of children's literature reflects the ideas society has had in different periods about who children are and what they need. You will learn how to analyze pictures and stories in Chapters 3 and 4 so that you can assess them for quality. And throughout the book, you will explore how the interaction between adults, children, and developmentally appropriate, quality literature enriches children's lives.

Of course, one of the primary purposes of children's literature is to help children learn to read. Learning to read, however, is much more complicated than simply knowing which marks on a page correspond to which sounds. In order to be truly literate, children must learn to make meaning from texts and pictures, to transform the words on the page into mental images of places, characters, and things that move and interact with one another. They need to connect causes and effects and problems and solutions, and they need to be able to follow paths of growth and development as they unfold. As we move through the chapters of this book, we will think carefully about how children's brain development grows alongside their increasing language and literacy development. This introductory chapter will offer an overview of how these factors interact, while Chapters 6–10 break down the interaction more precisely and suggest how to select and share developmentally appropriate, quality literature with children at different stages of their reading development.

Additionally, in this first chapter we will explore the various resources available to help readers find good books. In studies that focus on community and state literacy rates, researchers have found that access to many good books is the single most important factor affecting successful literacy acquisition (McQuillan, 1998; Shin, 2004). Ensuring book-rich environments for all children should thus be a top priority for early childhood educators. Throughout this book, we will discuss the types of books available for children and the appropriate ages at which to introduce them.

By the end of this book, then, you should feel confident in your ability to find, select, and share quality, developmentally appropriate literature with young children from birth to age 8.

What Does "Developmentally Appropriate" Mean?

"Developmentally appropriate" is a loaded term when it comes to describing literature for children. To assess whether a book is developmentally appropriate, however, we need to understand how language development and literacy are connected and how learning happens, but perhaps most importantly, we need to be attuned to children's preferences and emotional concerns.

It is tempting to rely solely on a mathematically based formula for assessing reading level and call that "developmentally appropriate." Most publishers of children's books produce series of leveled readers, that is, books that have been run through a formula that calculates variables such as sentence length, percentage of difficult words, and average number of syllables per word. What these formulae don't take into account is reader interest and developmental age, which produce motivations or barriers that can often differ greatly from a simplistic assessment of reading level. For instance, Scholastic Inc., the largest publisher and distributor of children's books in the world, has a resource on their website called the Book Wizard, where you can enter the title of a book and obtain a reading level for that book. According to their leveling system, Stephanie Meyer's Twilight has a reading grade level equivalent of 4.4 (Twilight, n.d.). This means that 50% of all students in their fourth month of fourth grade have attained the reading level necessary for understanding the words and sentence structures of that book. By contrast, the interest level of the book is listed as grades 9–12. However, no consideration beyond interest is given to the appropriateness of the content for the developmental age of the child. For examples of the various formulae used to determine readability levels.

In this book, we take a holistic approach to determining developmental appropriateness by focusing on children's preferences and their developmental concerns. We believe that while children need appropriate supports in learning to read, they are more likely to want to read if the literature they encounter is interesting to them, which means that it corresponds to the concerns of their developmental age. Moreover, they will stretch to more difficult texts if their prior experience with literature is engaging, meaningful, and satisfying. In Chapters 6–10 we focus on the kinds of texts most likely to correspond to abilities and preferences correlated with developmental age as well as where children are in their literacy development. We also use these factors to suggest the most effective ways to share those texts with children to ensure that they acquire fluency and confidence in reading.

1.4 Changing Definitions of Literacy

Literacy seems to have always been a vexed issue. Over the years, people have worried about how to teach it, who has access to it, how it is related to power and progress. Definitions of literacy have changed over time. For instance, in the early 19th century in America, the ability to sign one's name was all it took to be considered literate. However, prior to that, beginning in the 1600s in the colonies, local schools supported by their communities in New England fostered high levels of literacy in order for children to be able to read and understand the Bible. These local schools did not last through the Revolutionary War, but by the end of the 1700s, the idea of public, state-funded schools had caught on in New England with the interesting fact that the ability to read was a prerequisite for the 7-year-olds who wanted to attend the public grammar school, at least in Boston. The idea of secular, compulsory public schooling was introduced in the 1800s, a move that fostered the universal expectation of literacy for all citizens, if not its actualization.

The 20th Century: Dick and Jane Versus Eloise

During the 20th century, literacy always seemed to be in a state of crisis, a phenomenon epitomized by the mid-century book entitled Why Johnny Can't Read—And What You Can do About It (Flesch, 1955). A 1954 article in Life magazine claimed that one of the main reasons children didn't learn to read well was that the primers used in schools were boring. They featured spiffy, White, middle-class children who were universally good-natured and always did the right thing; rather than challenging children with adventure and conflict and acknowledging the fact that bad decisions often turn into the best stories.

More interesting books were out there, certainly, featuring rambunctious, humorous characters making dubious choices. Consider Curious George (Rey, 1941), The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Potter, 1902), and Eloise (Thompson, 1955), just to name three books available at the time. But books like these weren't being used in schools to teach children how to read. The director of the educational division at Houghton Mifflin, William Ellsworth Spaulding, presented the findings of the Life article as a challenge to his friend Ted Geisel, who, nine months later and using a pen name, presented him with a manuscript for The Cat in the Hat (Seuss, 1957). This book used only 236 words, all but 13 of which appeared on a list of words every first grader should know, and started a revolution of sorts in early reader books by combining education and entertainment. Arguably, though, this trend started long before Dr. Seuss, as we will see in Chapter 2. It might be more accurate to say that Seuss's Beginner Books series presented the first significant challenge to school curriculums in the 20th century, in that the books paid attention to the needs of reading instruction at the same time as they sought to tell interesting stories.

The emphasis in this midcentury literacy crisis mentality centered on students' ability to access traditional forms of reading and writing in a single language, and it arose at least in part out of a general philosophy of standardization and assimilation. In other words, this anxiety arose out of the belief that the purpose of schooling was to ensure that everyone could function at roughly the same level in the national language and achieve a certain level of what E. D. Hirsch in the 1980s called "cultural literacy." Hirsch's project caused some controversy, however, and not long after he published his authoritarian, directive curriculum of "what every American needs to know" (Hirsch, 1988), the emphasis shifted away from assimilation and shared cultural knowledge to an emphasis on showcasing and honoring cultural and linguistic diversity.

In the 21st century, given this shift in sensibility and the significant changes wrought by technology on our daily lives, educators are now being asked to radically re-conceptualize our ideas of literacy. Children today are growing up in an increasingly image-rich and media-saturated culture. Becoming literate means being able to "read" not only print but also images, moving images, and soundtracks designed to appeal directly to their emotions. While there is widespread worry that this increase in media will detract from traditional literacy acquisition and result in a decline in the habit and ability to read (see, for instance, NEA, 2004), an expanded definition of literacy can actually be quite helpful in considering literature for young children.

Multiliteracies

The New London Group (NLG), a group of 10 well-known literacy educators from the United States, Australia, and Great Britain, advocates for a shift in understanding and teaching literacy to incorporate multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996; Kalantzis & Cope, 2012). They suggest that we focus on six different ways that we make meaning:

linguistic literacy, which includes elements of tradition verbal and written language;

audio literacy, which includes music and sound effects;

visual literacy, which includes elements of visual design, such as color, perspective, shape, position, and so forth;

gestural literacy, which includes behavior, gesture, physicality, feelings, movement;

spatial literacy, which includes elements of geographical and ecosystem design and architectural and sculptural design; and

tactile literacy, which includes elements of touch, smell, and taste.

According to the NLG, the ability to analyze and use these modes is necessary for both understanding our world as it is and for crafting a future that we find meaningful and fulfilling. More importantly for our purposes, however, is the understanding that these literacies are crucial for young children as they learn to read. Infants begin the process of learning to read gestures and other visual information almost immediately after birth. They also start to interpret sounds and space as they become habituated to their environments; they learn, for instance, to associate their cribs with being alone, or kitchens with community and interesting activity and smells.

As they grow, their understandings and manipulations of these literacies become more intentional and form the basis for their understanding of literary texts. When children have stories read to them, they use their embodied experiences to make sense of the words and pictures. They draw on their knowledge of sounds, facial expressions and gestures, spatial environments and features, what things feel and smell like, and visual information to turn words into mental images that make a story come alive. The stories themselves then expand those mental models so that they can imagine worlds and scenarios beyond their everyday experiences. This is how reading works and how it provides pleasure: It starts by linking our sensory experiences to the words on a page, and then the words on the page help our imaginations reach beyond what we have experienced into new possibilities.

Because good reading—that is, the ability to make meaning from texts—depends on children's ability to employ these multiliteracies effectively, it is important that we help them build a wealth of multimodal experiences and engage them in conversations that encourage their understanding of the various modes. We will explore this process in more depth in future chapters, using the NLG's multiliteracies as our guide and organizational strategy. Our focus is on literature appropriate for children from infancy to age 8, or third grade. However, there are differences in the ages at which children acquire literacy, as well as different terminology used by literacy specialists, so we have divided our developmental discussion into three broad stages of reading development: prereaders, new readers, and young readers. For each level, there will be one chapter devoted to the development and enrichment of audio and linguistic literacies and another that focuses on visual, gestural, spatial, and tactile literacies. For a more extensive discussion on multiliteracies and the work of the New London Group

1.5 How Does the Path to Literacy and Literary Enjoyment Begin?

Ellen Dissanayake, a scholar who studies the role of art in cultures around the globe, claims that the bond between infant and caregivers begins in what she and others call "communicative musicality" (2009, p. 23). Mothers and infants develop relational call-and-response patterns that bring them in sync with one another and enable bonding. Dissanayake explores this bonding behavior as an explanation for the origins of music in human society, but we can link it to how an appreciation of literature begins. The literature we share with children is a way of communicating with them the wonder and possibilities of the world we live in. And it begins with helping them recognize patterns and developing the skill of joint attention.

Being new to the world is certainly stressful for the baby, but having a new baby is also stressful for the caregiver; getting to know a whole new person who is wholly dependent on you for survival can be overwhelming. "Getting to know someone" means figuring out what is predictable or consistent about that person's responses and behaviors. Part of getting to know a new baby involves actively helping the baby establish patterns of predictability that will make the baby feel safe by imposing some order on the world. One of a caregiver's or early childhood educator's most important roles in working with infants and young children is to help them structure their world so that they have categories and patterns into which they can fit new information. Adults help children make sense of their world.

Dissanayake stresses, however, that communication between adults and infants is not a one-way street. Instead, she says, babies teach adults how to talk to them by responding in different ways to different utterances. Infants are more likely to respond positively to expressions that are "simplified, repeated, exaggerated, and elaborated" (2009, p. 23). Again, although Dissanayake's claims are made in the service of explaining how music functions in human culture, we can see how these observations of infant preferences can be mapped onto not only the kinds of music they enjoy but the literature they favor as well. Children's poetry and nursery rhymes typically make use of the qualities of simplification, repetition, exaggeration, and elaboration.

Dissanayake also says that children prefer multimodal presentations—that is, through "simultaneous vocal, visual, and kinesic (relating to motion) expressions" (2009, p. 23). Children's literature is almost always presented in a multimodal format—that is, a format that engages more than one of the five senses. Storytellers use their bodies and voices to convey their message, and often incorporate music and costuming and invite children to participate in the storytelling process, either by joining in on a repetitive refrain or by acting out a behavior. Action songs and rhymes are a large part of children's literature and culture. But perhaps the most dominant and familiar form of children's literature, the form that defines the genre, is the children's picturebook—a multimodal form of infinite variety that in so many ways ushers children into the world of literacy.

As adults share picturebooks with children, they are engaging them in an activity that draws on all six multiliteracies in order to make meaning. While looking at the pictures and simultaneously hearing the words or having conversations about the book, children are engaged in a project of joint attention with an adult over a special kind of object. They are not eating or being dressed or rolling a ball back and forth. Instead, the adult is showing them something that they are expected to make meaning from. By pointing and directing their eyes to the pictures on the page, adults help them make the connection between two-dimensional images, spoken and written words, and objects in their world. Children begin fitting the images on the page and the words they hear into mental models they have developed from their own experiences. Eventually, they come to understand how books work. That is, they learn that images and words are not just objects to be looked at, but that they have intentions, so to speak. They are trying to say something that the child needs to try to understand. This is the starting point of print literacy.

Developmental Considerations

In first-world cultures such as the United States, literacy development is as important to children as learning to walk and talk. Researchers in the development of identity argue that this is because we develop our sense of self from words and images that are available to us, and these include images from print and nonprint literature and media (Bracher, 2009; Gergen, 2000; Strenger, 2005). Children's texts in particular provide a range of images that children learn to identity with and imitate on the one hand, and dis-identify with and distance themselves from on the other. So it is necessary to understand how development occurs, and the role literature and literacy play in that development, in order to understand how to choose and share developmentally appropriate literature that supports healthy growth, a strong sense of self, and a positive orientation toward others.

Developmental psychologists have developed stage theories to describe various aspects of how children grow and change in relatively predictable ways. Two things are important to remember about stage theories: First, children progress through stages at different rates, depending on innate abilities, temperament, and environmental factors, so the age range attributed to stages is approximate. The order of the stages is more important than the age at which each stage is achieved. Second, stages should not be thought of as one-way gates toward progress. That is, once children have moved from one stage to another, they don't simply abandon the ways of thinking that characterized the earlier stage forever. Instead, they have more complex ways of thinking available to them as they approach a task. A better way to think about stages is that each stage offers what art education professor Michael J. Parsons calls "a cluster of ideas" (1987, p. 11) for considering a problem or thinking about a work of art or an aspect of a relationship.

Parsons adds that each stage of development, whether it be cognitive, moral, social, or aesthetic, moves progressively toward a greater capacity to consider the perspectives of others (1987). This is important in terms of literacy development and literature appreciation. The ability to understand stories requires the ability to take the perspective of characters and think about why they behave as they do. In turn, the more children listen and respond to stories, the greater their capacity to enter into the perspective of characters. This helps them consider more options when they approach conflict in their own lives.

Another reason to consider stage theories in relation to literature is to consider what kinds of books children will likely be interested in at what stages. For instance, British doctor and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott asserts that an infant's most crucial need is for an adequate "holding environment." Babies need to be held, literally and emotionally, so that they are able "to feel the body is the place where the psyche lives" (Winnicott, 1964, p. 194). Literally speaking, holding a baby while reading a book or singing to him or her helps the child feel safe. Many children's books, such as Mem Fox's Time for Bed (1993), Denise Fleming's Sleepy, Oh So Sleepy (2010) and Jean-Baptiste Baronian's Con Todo Mi Corazon (originally published in French as De Tout mon Coeur, 1998) offer comforting images of holding, in which human and animal parents cuddle their babies. As they grow older, Winnicott notes, children work through their ongoing need for physical holding through the use of a "transitional object" such as a blanket or a teddy bear. The beloved character Corduroy was introduced in 1968 (Corduroy, Don Freeman) and remains popular today precisely because children relate to the need for a transitional object.

The most influential developmental stage theories were framed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, German-born American developmental psychologist Erik Erikson, and American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg. We will briefly review their theories here and relate them to the kinds of themes common in books for young children. In Chapters 6–10, we will hone in more specifically on how understanding development can assist in choosing developmentally appropriate literature in terms of format and presentation.

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development

Piaget proposed a model of intellectual or cognitive development. He believed that children's intellectual development grew in tandem with their physical development. As children grow, he reasoned, they organize their experience into categories. Early concept books, which feature objects grouped according to a single characteristic, such as color or shape, and concept books, which are informational books organized around a single subject, help children with the work of categorizing. Learning requires that they adapt those categories in one of two ways: assimilation or accommodation. Assimilation occurs when new information can be made to fit existing categories. For instance, a child may have environmental experience with a particular kind of dog, but when introduced to Matthew van Fleet's Dog (2007), which shows 20 different kinds of dogs, the child inputs a variety of new data into his or her category of dog.

Accommodation occurs when the new data can't be made to fit the existing category, so the category itself needs to be adjusted. Suppose a child knows what a horse is and then watches the children's film Racing Stripes (2005) or reads a traditional alphabet book. The child knows that horses can come in different colors and have patterned hides, but a "horse" with black and white stripes is not a horse at all. The child then has to change his existing knowledge to accommodate the new information.

Although Piaget proposed these are two separate kinds of learning adaptations, they most often happen in concert with each other, with children testing and exploring what things are like other things and how categories can be formed to break up the world into manageable chunks. Books for very young children assist in the development and expansion of mental categories by presenting various objects grouped by one or two dominant characteristics. For instance, Matthew van Fleet has a series of board books that focus on a single species (Dog, 2007; Cat, 2009) or body part (Heads, 2010; Tails, 2003). Mem Fox and Helen Oxenbury introduce the concept of diversity in their board book Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes (2008) by featuring a cast of multicultural tykes from different environments all over the world that nevertheless share the characteristic of having ten little fingers and ten little toes.

Erikson's Stages of Psychosocial Development

Erik Erikson's theory of psychosocial development grew out of Sigmund Freud's theory of psychosexual development. Freud linked each stage to a particular erogenous zone of the body that a child focuses on to achieve satisfaction, including an oral stage, an anal stage, and phallic stage. He tied these stages of development to problems of sexual and gender identity and general effectiveness as a human being later in life. His focus on psychosexual development made his work very controversial, but later Freudian thinkers, such as Erikson, expanded Freud's focus beyond gender and sexual development to the development of the personality as whole. While Erikson developed his theory beyond childhood all the way to old age, we will focus on the relevant stages from birth to age 8.

Erikson formulated his stages around a set of basic conflicts that children must work through as they grow. The way children resolve these conflicts creates a pattern of relationality that can persist throughout their lives. Understanding the nature of these conflicts helps us understand which books may be useful to children at certain times in their lives. Children can use the stories and behaviors modeled in books and other media to help them understand and work through the conflicts they are experiencing.

Kohlberg's Stages of Moral Development

Lawrence Kohlberg supplemented Piaget's theory of cognitive development with a breakdown of the stages of moral development. He developed his theory through extensive conversations with children. However, it is important to remember that the level of children's moral reasoning does not always correspond to their moral behavior. Children often act out of compassion or selfishness even when it goes against their principles. The later stages of Kohlberg's system have been criticized for overemphasizing the importance of individualism and personal rights and freedoms, while other cultural values, such as the importance of interdependence and social responsibility are devalued. However, the early stages do seem to correspond to children's developing moral reasoning.

These theories of development can act as fairly reliable guides to choosing books that children will find interesting and relevant to their current situations. As we move through the chapters of this book, we will introduce further details about development from different perspectives so that we can get a fuller picture of what developmentally appropriate literature means.

Multiple Intelligences

In addition to considering developmental stages when choosing literature for children, it is also helpful to understand Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences (1983). There is considerable conceptual overlap between the NLG's articulation of multiliteracies and Gardner's theory, considering that they both respond to the diverse ways we interpret experience. Gardner argues that there is no general way of conceiving of intelligence but that people are intelligent in different registers. He proposes nine such ways of being smart:

Spatial: an ability to understand and visualize objects in two- and three-dimensional space

Logical-mathematical: an ability to reason through abstractions, recognize patterns, perform calculations, think critically, and consider multiple hypotheses

Linguistic: an ease with spoken and written language, including storytelling, creative uses of language, debate and discussion, and the ability to learn multiple languages

Bodily-kinethestic: an ability to effectively use and control one's gross and fine motor skills and to train those skills until they become seemingly instinctual; also includes a strong sense of time, space, and goals with regard to bodily actions

Musical: an ability to distinguish sound, pitch, rhythm, meter, melody, and tone

Interpersonal: a sensitivity to the emotional needs and expressions of other people and an ability to cooperate with and/or direct groups

Intrapersonal: an ability to understand and reflect on one's own actions and motivations

Naturalistic: a sensitivity to one's natural environment, including animals, plants, and geographical features

Existential: a sensitivity to and ability to contemplate ideas and phenomena that transcend the senses (Gardner resisted the idea of a spiritual intelligence but considered this an acceptable substitute)

Gardner contends that education programs emphasizing only linguistic and logical-mathematic intelligence (which are dominant in most school settings) miss many of the ways in which children approach the world. According to Gardner, all people possess all of the intelligences to some degree, with one or two being dominant. Children prefer to approach tasks and activities that use the modalities through which they excel.

Many of the intelligence modes interact and overlap with each other; for instance, people with a high degree of musical intelligence may also tend to excel in logical-mathematical tasks, since there are similarities in musical and mathematical structures. But sometimes, people with a high level of empathy, or interpersonal intelligence, might be seen as troublemakers in school or day care settings, since their concern for other people often runs afoul of classroom rules of staying quiet, attending to their own work, and keeping their hands to themselves. Alternately, immature leadership skills may devolve into bullying if teachers and caregivers don't recognize and channel this expression of interpersonal intelligence in sensitive ways.

Understanding the various kinds of intelligence enables parents and caregivers to select books for children that respond to their interests and their modes of approaching the world. For instance, 3-to-5-year-olds who have a tendency to ask big questions about why the physical world works the way it does (existential intelligence) will appreciate the philosophical and metaphorical connections in Mary Lyn Ray's and Marla Frazee's Stars (2011). Children who demonstrate a naturalistic intelligence will appreciate Joyce Sidman's poetry and gravitate toward books that explore animal behavior and habitats. Stories about family relationships and friendships will appeal to children who favor inter- and intrapersonal intelligence modes.

In addition to aiding book selection, an understanding of multiple intelligences can assist educators in determining the best ways to share books with their particular children. Young readers with interpersonal intelligence skills can be encouraged to share their favorite books with prereaders in one-on-one reading sessions. Logical-mathematical learners can be paired with bodily-kinesthetic learners to create sets, props, and puppets to augment story times. Children who demonstrate musical intelligence can be asked to create and perform a song in response to a book.

Choosing the right book for the right children at the right time depends on careful observation skills. By paying attention to the habits, fears, and preoccupations of the children under your care and thinking about them in light of developmental stages and different kinds of intelligences, you can assess what topics, themes, and kinds of books will be most likely to meet their needs and preferences. The question, then, becomes where you find the books themselves.

1.6 Where to Find Children's Books

Children's books are everywhere, from grocery stores to large department stores to specialty bookshops. With nearly 30,000 children's books published every year, the sheer volume of books available can be overwhelming. Getting to know your way around your local public or school library is a good first step to finding what you need.

Libraries and Bookstores

The most general categories that books fall into are fiction and nonfiction. Fiction encompasses all stories that are imaginary, that never actually happened. This doesn't mean that they are not "true," because all good stories have elements of truth to them, but it is psychological or moral truth, not historical truth. Nonfiction, then, covers all books that relate incidents that actually happened, or explain known facts about the world. That doesn't mean that every nonfiction book is "true," because every incident is told through a perspective which may or may not be shared by everyone who experienced that incident, and what we know about the world sometimes changes. Fiction books are alphabetized by the last name of their authors, while nonfiction books are organized by topic. Bookstores use broad categories, but libraries use the more precise categories and subcategories of the Dewey Decimal System.

Developed in 1876, the Dewey decimal classification (DDC) system is a way of organizing library collections into 10 main categories. Each category then has subcategories to make the organization more meaningful. Books are arranged according to call numbers that correspond to the subcategories. Most public libraries have special children's sections that are organized according to the DDC, but they insert a J before the call number to indicate that it is part of their juvenile collection. It's important for people who work with young children to be familiar with the DDC so that they can respond to children's interests as well as work toward specific learning goals.

Here are the 10 classifications in the DDC:

000–099   Computer Science, Information, and General Works

100–199   Philosophy and Psychology

200–299   Religion

300–399   Social Sciences

400–499   Language

500–599   Science

600–699   Technology

700–799   Arts

800–899   Literature

900–999   History, Geography, and Biography

For instance, nonfiction children's picturebooks on snakes will be found in the J500s, specifically J597, with other books on cold-blooded vertebrates. Andrea Pinkney's Sit-in: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down is identified by the call number J323.1196 PIN, which indicates that it is a book about civil and political rights and that the author's last name starts with the letters PIN.

What you find in some categories may be surprising. For instance, folk and fairy tales might seem oddly out of place in the 300s, but they are classified under the subcategory "customs, etiquette, and folklore" in J398. Children's poetry will be found in the J811. Technically, this section is devoted to American poetry, but in children's sections, most poetry books will be in that category.

Notice that there is a literature category (800–899), but most libraries separate out fiction books so that readers can more easily find them. In children's sections, which are usually in a special area of the library, fiction is further divided into categories of picturebooks, middle grade literature, and young adult literature. Some libraries also have categories for beginning readers, which is where they shelve leveled readers, both fiction and nonfiction, and for early readers, which is where they put early chapter books, graphic novels for young readers, and series fiction. Other sections may be set aside for board books, audio books, award winners, and books that are not written in English.

Children's sections in bookstores are often organized in a similar fashion, with separate sections for board books, leveled readers, early chapter books, and picturebooks. They may have shelves set aside for award winners and books in other languages. In addition, they may have sections devoted to a specific publisher, like Disney Hyperion. Bookstores are more likely than libraries to carry tactile books, such as movable books or activity books (sticker books, puzzle books, books that have wheels attached or other toy-like features, etc.) because tactile books are not particularly durable or aren't meant to be shared with multiple readers.

Introducing Children to Librarians

Books are not the only important resource in the library or the bookstore: School and public librarians, fellow teachers, and bookstore employees are enormously valuable resources in helping you choose books for individual students as well as classroom use, particularly when you are just starting out in the profession. Many libraries will arrange guided tours of their facilities for day-care groups. Some have outreach librarians who will visit your facility to share books and introduce children to the services that libraries offer. If possible, you can arrange a regular weekly visit to the library with your children so that they learn to feel comfortable there.

It is also important for children to develop the confidence to approach a librarian on their own. Since young children can be bashful, and since approaching unfamiliar adults can be intimidating, the key is preparation. Maria Montessori, founder of the Montessori educational approach, included what she called "grace and courtesy" lessons as part of the Montessori practical life curriculum. She believed that children need the sense of order that social manners provides. While many children are taught manners, greeting protocols, and proper ways to get the attention of an adult as a matter of course, many are not, and this can make it difficult for them to feel comfortable in unfamiliar social situations. You can help your children become more comfortable with adults by teaching them proper manners. Consider the following suggested books about manners.

Books About Manners

Cole, Babette. Lady Lupin's Guide to Etiquette. (2002, Spanish edition, El Libro de Etiqueta de Lady Lupina, 2003).

Cooper, Ilene and Swiatowska, Gabi. The Golden Rule. (2007).

Dutton, Sandra. Dear Miss Perfect: A Beast's Guide to Proper Behavior. (2007).

Eberly, Sheryl. 365 Manners Kids Should Know: Games, Activities, and Other Fun Ways to Help Children Learn Etiquette. (2011, teacher resource).

Goldberg, Whoopi and Olo. Whoopi's Big Book of Manners. (2010).

James, Elizabeth and Barkin, Carol. Social Smarts: Manners for Today's Kids. (teacher resource, 1996).

Joslin, Sesyle and Sendak, Maurice. What Do You Say, Dear? (1986).

Keller, Laurie. Do Unto Otters: A Book about Manners. (2007).

Leaf, Munro. How to Speak Politely and Why. (2005).

Melling, David. The Scallywags. (2006).

Polisar, Barry Louis and Clark, David. Don't Do That!: A Child's Guide to Bad Manners, Ridiculous Rules, and Inadequate Etiquette. (1995).

Rosenthal, Amy Krouse and Dyer, Jane. Cookies: Bite-Size Life Lessons. (2006).

Sierra, Judy and Seibold, J. Otto. Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf. (2007).

Sierra, Judy and Bowers, Tim. Suppose You Meet a Dinosaur: A First Book of Manners. (2012).

Willems, Mo. Time to Say "Please!" (2005).

Another method of preparing older children (that is, 5 years old and up) to approach librarians is to have them do a personal interest inventory. These are useful for students to clarify their own interests as well as for you to keep on file as you design curriculum for your students. It is also interesting to revisit them later in the school year to see if interests and attitudes toward reading have changed.

Once students have completed the inventory, role-play the interaction between the student and a librarian. Begin by having the student introduce him or herself, and politely ask for the librarian's name. This step is one we often skip in such interactions, but the goal is for the student to develop a trusting relationship with this very important adult, so it helps to know each other's names. Then have the student ask for a book on a certain topic he or she would like to pursue. The librarian will likely ask questions that the student will have already answered on the inventory, such as what sort of books he likes or even a specific title that he particularly enjoyed. Because students have done the inventory, they will have a ready answer, which will increase the likelihood of a successful reader's advisory.

Now, they are ready to meet their librarian. If this activity is limited to a school context, the school librarian will likely have already met the children in your class, and be familiar with both your curriculum and their interests (librarians are wondrously good at getting to know individual students' reading preferences and habits). It is important, though, to have the students meet the public librarian in their town as well, since public libraries often have different collections than school libraries, and they are open in the summer. A class trip might be arranged, but it would be better if students could go in small groups, which could be accomplished through the enlistment of parent and grandparent volunteers who would be willing to take children in small groups to the library during or after school hours. Involving parents in these excursions can have the added benefit of introducing them to library services as well; bear in mind that some parents may be as uncomfortable as their children with such an outing, so arranging to meet them at the library with their children might help them feel more confident. Remind the parents, though, that the goal is for their children to learn to speak for themselves, so they should stand back and let the children make their own introductions and inquiries.

Finding Books Online

Another way for you to find books, of course, is online. When you want to find a list of books focusing on a specific topic, you can simply enter your query into your favorite search engine (Google, Bing, etc.), and let the vast online community of parents, librarians, teachers, authors, illustrators, and children's literature bloggers make suggestions for you. Reviews of books are widely available from multiple sources. (A few examples are listed in Websites to Save and Explore at the end of this chapter.) As always with Internet searches, however, you should consider the source of the information. Some websites have specific ideological or commercial interests. This can be very helpful, depending on your community, but you need to educate yourself regarding the perspective of the site and cross-check its information against other sites.

Additionally, while many websites and blogs that review and highlight children's books are free, others have subscription fees for full access. For instance, teachingbooks.net offers a wealth of resources to inspire and complement your lesson planning, such as video author interviews and readings, themed book lists, book guides and lesson plans, suggestions for Common Core curriculum alignment, and professional articles. They offer licensing options for school districts and public libraries, as well as homeschool groups.

Another way to search is to enter a single author or title into a search engine. Among other options, you will be directed to online bookstores. Online bookstores such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble feature reader reviews, lists, and suggestions for other titles, so a simple search can open into a wealth of options and possibilities. These vendors often allow you to preview the book through the Look Inside feature. Additionally, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Google have e-book apps that can be loaded onto multiple devices, and many of the books available are free or very low cost.

2.1 What Is Literature?

Literature can be defined in multiple ways. In one respect, the term simply refers to any writing on any subject. For instance, the literature on mental illness or gardening refers to reliable, well-informed writing on those particular subjects. But when most people hear the word literature, they think in terms of literary merit or quality; in such usage, literature refers to books that are well-written and have a significant message to communicate.

Lots of people get into fussy debates about what defines “quality” literature. They establish what they call canons, which are lists of books and poems that they believe every truly literate person should have read and studied because these books, according to them, represent the best expressions of what it means to be fully human. Literature is thus understood as the most effective expression of some meaningful truth about experience. The problem is that these list makers are using their own standards of what constitutes beauty and wisdom, standards marked by their historical period, cultural ideologies, and social position, which are affected by their race, class, spiritual tradition, and gender, among other things. What they regard as universal human truth is really quite specific to their own experiences; what they regard as beauty has been conditioned by their social and cultural position. Like taste in visual art, taste in literature is both culturally and personally determined rather than based on some universal standard of value.

Moreover, people who construct canons of “best books” often seem to value adult culture over child culture, so most books written for children don't make their cut (see, for instance, Lacayo, 2005; Lewis, 1998; Norwegian Book Club, 2002). Yet it is important to remember that the literature we read as children has a great effect on the way we grow up to appreciate language, humor, other people, and beauty. We don't learn to see or form value judgments simply through our experiences; we also learn through the books we read as children.

One of the reasons children's literature is important is that it forms the foundation of literary competence. The books children read when they are young help them understand and enjoy works of literature when they are older. For instance, knowing that a work is a poem requires a reader to draw on different skill sets and experiential knowledge in order to understand why it looks the way it does and what attitudes to bring to it in order to make sense of and appreciate it. Knowing that fairy tales often begin with the phrase “once upon a time” clues a reader in to what to expect from a story that starts that way. Literary competence goes beyond literacy in that readers must have some knowledge about how figurative language and genres work in order to approach a new work of literature.

As we noted in chapter one, children's literature always teaches, not because it's overly preachy or didactic, but because children are starting from scratch when it comes to learning about the ways the world works and the ways they can engage with it. Chapter 4 will discuss the characteristics of quality children's literature so that you can make informed choices of children's literature that meets your curricular goals as well as provides the best possible foundation for children in order that they may become lifelong readers.

2.2 What Are Children?

At first glance, this may seem like a rather silly question, but in fact the way we think about children has changed over time. So the second term to examine when considering children's literature is children. Beliefs about who children are and what they need are neither universal nor static; they change over time and across cultures. Today, for instance, in most developed countries we tend to view childhood as a time when small humans need to be protected from work and instead engage in play and learning in a safe, structured environment. All kinds of consumer goods, events, and artifacts, including toys, clothes, furniture, housewares, foods, play equipment, media, music, concerts, and, of course, books, are developed, produced, and marketed specifically for children. Special places set aside for children, such as playgrounds and children's rooms, form part of our contemporary spatial literacy; we teach children how to navigate the larger world by providing smaller, safer spaces for them to navigate. Moreover, though, the very existence of such spaces indicates that we consider childhood distinct from adulthood. This has not been the case throughout history and is not the case today in many parts of the world.

Unlike other categories of literature, such as women's literature or American literature, children's literature is defined by its audience, not its authorship. In order for a culture to have special literature devoted to children, the culture must first have a notion of childhood as a separate time of life with special educational and developmental needs. Second, there must be a sufficient number of people in the culture who have enough disposable income and leisure time to create, purchase, and share goods not immediately related to their survival, such as children's books, that correspond to the special needs of children. Third, the culture must have sufficiently developed technology to produce books on a large scale for distribution and consumption.

The next sections describe how these three conditions developed in Europe and the United States. In many parts of the world, these conditions are still in development. Many nonprofit organizations around the world are working to develop reading cultures in their countries and bring children and books together.

Childhood in Medieval Europe

Thinking about the special needs of children has developed into an academic field of study called Childhood Studies or Children's Studies. This research area could be said to have been started by historian Philippe Ariès with his 1962 book Centuries of Childhood, in which he made the controversial claim that, “in medieval society, the notion of childhood did not exist” (p. 125). Such a bold claim was bound to meet with criticism, and it has (see, for instance, Hendrick, 1992). Ariès based his claim mostly on portraiture of the Middle Ages in Western Europe that showed children dressed as miniature adults, as well as on the cultural practice of putting children as young as 7 to work as apprentices.

Critics of Ariès's argument claim that he based it on faulty evidence: Yes, children were dressed as little adults for their portraits, but this probably wasn't the way they dressed every day. Then, as now, sitting for a portrait was a special event and a marker of status, and special clothing would have been chosen for the occasion. Additionally, Ariès based some of his evidence on the writings of moralists and educationists of the time, and as we know, what the experts and theorists say we should be thinking and doing regarding our children doesn't always correspond with what we actually do. Without accounts of actual practice in terms of childrearing, it's difficult to know how parents felt about their children.

In her 2008 book, The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood, Eva M. Simms makes a more compelling argument than Ariès does: She says that a firm notion of childhood as a separate time of life depends on a firm notion of adulthood. Without the latter, you don't have the former. In most medieval villages in Europe, people lived surrounded by the same few villagers their entire lives, with few learning to read or ever going on a voyage or doing anything that might be considered a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. Marriage and having children might or might not involve moving out of one's childhood home into one of your own, so even those traditional markers of assuming adult responsibility were not clearly delineated as significant changes in status. Work that contributed to the welfare of a family began as early as possible, and most people did not attend school, if one were even available. Without that protected period of relative leisure and learning followed by a hard break or significant new experience, there is no distinction between cultural ideas of what a child is versus what an adult is. People were babies and then contributing members of a community, so there would be no need for a separate literature dedicated to the tastes and concerns of children.

Even in schools, there were no books, given that books were expensive and precious. Before the invention of the printing press in 1450, a single hand-copied edition of the Bible could take up to three years to produce. What manuscripts did exist for young people in the Middle Ages, such as The Babee's Book, written in the 1400s and similarly hand-copied, were concerned with teaching proper conduct (read the book online in modern English in the Internet Archive here). So despite the fact that there was not a separate storytelling or literary tradition devoted to children prior to the 1700s, there was the sense that at least some children, primarily those born to wealthy families, did have a special need to be instructed in their cultural traditions and expectations. However, manuscripts of this sort were extremely rare. More common for the teaching of literacy were hornbooks, which typically contained the alphabet, the Lord's Prayer, and common vowel and consonant combinations.

It should be remembered, though, that stories started with storytellers, not with books, and not much thought was given to whether an oral story was “appropriate” for children or not. Children in the Middle Ages would have been exposed to traditional, sometimes bawdy and violent, folk tales and epics told to entertain people as they worked, as well as the adventure stories popular for the literate and the preliterate alike. Children in Southern Europe would likely have known versions of the stories of the Greeks and Romans, which included the tales of the Trojan War as preserved in the Iliad, the exploits of Odysseus as he traveled home from the war, and the fables of the slave Aesop. The stories of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, which we now called myths, would have also provided entertainment on dark evenings, offering fanciful explanations of things such as the origins of the seasons and the creation of the world, as well as the gods' use of humans as pawns and playthings in their high-stakes games. During the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, the Norse and Celtic myths recounting the exploits of Odin and Loki and tales of heroes such as Robin Hood and King Arthur would have been part of the storytellers' repertoire. And of course, lesser known tales would have been invented by talented talespinners everywhere to commemorate regional heroes.

Today, we might consider the sexual exploits of Zeus too racy or the tale of Beowulf too grisly for children under the age of 8 or 9, but this was not the case when whole communities joined together to hear the stories recounted by an itinerant or local storyteller. Children thrilled to the heroics and blanched with fear right along with the adults as they listened to these breathtaking adventure tales. Although the study of Greek mythology is now usually part of the middle school curriculum, versions for younger children are available, such as this one.

In addition to these secular stories, children learned their religious traditions orally as well. Storytellers would recount tales from the Old and New Testaments as well as stories of the lives of the saints, to both titillate and instruct. In addition to these oral tellings, children from Catholic and Orthodox families would also have learned the stories of the Bible through the iconography of their churches. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, icons are stylized paintings of important scenes from the Bible that have specific meanings embedded in their use of color, gesture, and figure. They were used to focus the attention of parishioners on worship and instruct people who couldn't read in the stories of the Bible and the lives of the saints. Similar purposes were served by the elaborate stained glass windows of churches. Churchgoers would have understood these complicated visual images on different levels. Some tell stories in much the same way as wordless picturebooks today do, inviting readers to navigate their way through a series of scenes in order to piece together a sequence of events. Again, while these visual stories were not specifically developed for children, they played a significant role in shaping their understanding of religion, which was central to their daily lives.

Childhood in the Renaissance and the Reformation

As early as 1658, we find a book of words and pictures written and published especially for children to be used in schools. Orbis Sensualium Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures) was written by Czech educator John Amos Comenius (1592–1670) and is considered the first picturebook in Western Europe intended specifically for children. The book was intended to teach children to read as well as to provide information about the natural world, religion, and humans and their activities and diversity. Comenius's acknowledgement of the value of what would come to be called multimodal learning has more or less set the standard for children's books ever since, and the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) even gives an award in his name for the best nonfiction books for children every year. For information about the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award and lists of past winners, see http://www.ncte.org/awards/orbispictus.

Comenius was vastly influential in the development of educational thought, and particularly in the organization of schools. Like other Protestant thinkers, he believed that everyone was responsible for his or her own salvation, so literacy was essential for children so that they could read the Bible on their own. This way of thinking, also espoused by the Puritans, contributed to the spread of literacy and the growth of schools. Although the Puritans frowned on the inclusion of secular stories in their school materials, feeling that most fictional stories were ungodly, they did encourage the use of poetry as a memory and worship aid in books like the New England Primer, especially the poetry of Isaac Watts (1674–1748). Isaac Watts was in fact so popular that his work was parodied in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland books. And there is at least one poem written by Isaac Watts, “Joy to the World,” that virtually every English-speaking person who celebrates Christmas can recite from memory, nearly 300 years since it was first penned.

Comenius and the Puritans, as well as earlier Reformation thinkers such as John Calvin (1509–1564), shared the view that children come into the world marked by original sin. They thus took child-rearing and education very seriously, since they believed that children need to be called out of a prior sinful condition into a salvation marked by good works (which they believed were a Christian's responsibility) and earthly success (which they believed to be a sign of God's blessing). This did not necessarily mean that they were harsh and unloving parents or that they believed that children needed to have the devil beaten out of them. On the contrary, they most often took their earthly relationships to be a model for their heavenly ones; Calvin, for instance, believed that children were gifts from God sent to teach people about unconditional love and remind us of the goodness of creation.

Two influential thinkers, John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), were to challenge the Puritan belief about human nature in general, and children in particular. Rather than believing that children were born with an innate bent toward sin, English philosopher John Locke believed that children's minds were blank slates or what he called tabula rasa. All children are born unprejudiced, with the capacity to learn, and it is up to adults to provide them with an adequately enriched educational environment. His emphasis was on a naturalistic education that answered children's questions about the world and kept them from unhealthy imaginings. He explicitly rejected, for instance, the practice of scaring children into good behavior through the use of frightening stories. Children had access to horror stories as well as traditional fairy tales not only through their nursemaids but through the increasing availability of chapbooks and broadsides, which featured a variety of tales of knights and creatures such as “Rawhead” and “Bloody Bones” designed to shock and frighten readers. Locke believed that in banishing the supernatural from children's stories, society could banish all superstitious and irrational fears, beliefs, and behaviors; on the contrary, introducing children to scary stories when they are young will lead to their becoming fearful and timid adults.

Approximately 100 years after Locke penned his ideas, Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced an even more radical idea of children's nature: Unlike the Puritans (and other Judeo-Christian thinkers), he rejected the idea of original sin, and unlike Locke, he rejected the idea of children's minds as blank slates. Instead, Rousseau believed children are born naturally good and that they grew increasingly corrupted by adult society as they matured. Therefore, his approach to child-rearing was to keep children as far from society as possible, and this included delaying children's reading until they had reached the age of 12, and then they were only to read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) and certain bits of the Bible. He published his ideals for child-rearing in a book called Émile in 1762, and though most people no longer read this work, his way of thinking about children has become widely pervasive.

Childhood in the 18th and 19th Centuries

Despite the differences of these three schools of thought, there emerged a clear sense throughout the 1600s and 1700s that children were different from adults, and their moral, spiritual, and intellectual education required special attention, which included books written especially for children. Locke's admonition that when a child

begins to be able to read, some easy pleasant book, suited to his capacity, should be put into his hands, wherein the entertainment, that he finds, might draw him on, and reward his pains in reading; and yet not such as should fill his head with perfectly useless trumpery, or lay the principles of vice and folly. (1693, para. 156)

About 50 years later, in 1744 John Newbery (c. 1713–1767), for whom the Newbury Award was named, published A Little Pretty Pocket Book. Widely considered the first nonschool or commercial book for children, the title page claims that the book is “for the instruction and amusement” (emphasis added) of children. The book contains a section on parenting advice as well as poems and songs that are keyed to the letters of the alphabet, including the first reference in print to the game of baseball. To see a digitized copy of this book, click here. And lest we think that cross-marketing is a cynical invention of the 20th century, the book came with either a ball for boys or a pincushion for girls, with a letter from “Jack the Giant-Killer” instructing children to record and assess their behavior by sticking a pin in the red side of the ball or pincushion for every good action or the black side for every bad action.

Once Newbery introduced the practice of publishing for children, more and more writers began to write specifically for a child audience. Most of these writers were women, such as Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810), Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849), Hannah More (1745–1833), Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825), and Mary Martha Sherwood (1775–1851), and most of their writing was extremely moralistic and didactic—far more instruction than delight—although Mrs. Sherwood's three-volume History of the Fairchild Family (1818, 1842, and 1847) includes enough graphic descriptions of naughty children meeting grisly ends and being tortured in the pits of Hell to satisfy even the most ghoulish middle-grade imagination. What these writers, heavily influenced by Locke and Rousseau, would not acknowledge was that children do indeed have a dark side to their imaginations that isn't necessarily introduced from the outside—that acknowledgement would have to wait until the late 19th century and the work of Sigmund Freud.

Despite the objections of these thinkers to exposing children to the fantastic, the magical, and the darker side of life, folk and fairy tales have always been a very popular choice for readers and storytellers. Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a contemporary of Comenius, published Tales of Mother Goose in 1697, a popular collection of well-known oral tales, including Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Bluebeard, among others, that he imbued with literary style and concluded with instructive morals. In the 18th century, collecting and adapting oral tales into lasting literary versions came into vogue. Jeanne Marie de Beaumont (1711–1780) in France, Elizabeth Newbery (c. 1745–1821) in England, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837) in Russia, and Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) Grimm in Germany collected, revised, and published collections of folk and fairy tales indigenous to their countries. These collectors were attempting to preserve the treasures of the oral tradition, which they believed expressed the character and values of a people.

While these works were not necessarily written for children, and indeed people such as the female authors mentioned in the previous paragraph actively discouraged their being shared with children, they were widely read, told, and enjoyed by people of all ages. Inspired by the Grimm brothers, other collectors such as Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916) and Andrew Lang (1844–1912) in England, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen (1812–1885) and Jørgen Moe (1813–1882) in Norway scoured their respective countrysides in search of tales from the folk tradition. Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) drew on the folktales of Denmark to create his own original literary fairy tales. Contemporary children's literature is deeply indebted to these collectors, as their stories continue to be retold in diverse media to children. Table 2.2 lists some of the most famous fairy tales with their authors.

2.3 The Golden Age of Children's Books

As we said earlier, for a thriving children's literature tradition, a society requires the idea that childhood is separate from adulthood, sufficient affluence to purchase books and the leisure time to read them, and the technology to produce books on a large scale. These three conditions were all abetted in some way by the Industrial Revolution, which started in England in the late 1700s, and inaugurated what has come to be regarded as the “Golden Age” of children's books.

The Industrial Revolution was a hard road to travel for many children. Small bodies were required to fit into small spaces like mine shafts and chimneys and under machines; many machine operations required no special skills or strength; and children could be paid as little as 10–20 % of an adult's wages. This made child labor far too attractive for any moral qualms. With still few opportunities for education, children of the lower classes were expected to work. The ideological pull of Locke and Rousseau was strong among the educated classes, however, and public outrage and activism resulted in the first child labor laws being enacted in England: The Cotton Regulation Act of 1819 set the minimum working age at 9; the Regulation of Child Labor Law in 1833, which provided for paid inspectors; and the Ten Hours Bill of 1847, which set a limit of a 10-hour workday for women and children. The United States was much slower to enact legislation. Although 28 states had laws regulating child labor by 1899, the first national law specifying the ages at which children could be employed in various jobs was not successfully passed until 1938.

Despite the wretched conditions for child laborers and the poor, the Industrial Revolution led to sustained economic growth in per capita income in industrialized nations. Thus, by the late 19th century, all of the conditions for a robust children's literature tradition had been met, particularly in Victorian England (1837–1901), and children's books became a viable product. Finally, children's authors began to write books that would appeal to children simply because they were entertaining, and they even acknowledged a sometimes sly and subversive sense of humor that undercut adult authority.

Advances in printing technology allowed for the emergence of full-color illustration, prompting some of the most prominent illustrators of the time to turn their attention to illustrating for children. George Cruikshank, Walter Crane, John Tenniel, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway, and Arthur Rackham all became well-known for their children's book illustrations during this period. In 1899, Helen Bannerman published her very controversial but highly successful The Story of Little Black Sambo. In 1901, Beatrix Potter wrote The Tale of Peter Rabbit, a project that grew out of fantasies she invented around her own pets. Children's poetry remained popular, and many collections of poetry appeared in illustrated editions.

For older readers, adventure stories appeared for boys, such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883) and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Fantasy was at its (first) heyday with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872), J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). Girls' stories, such as Kate Douglas Wiggin's Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess (1905) and The Secret Garden (1911), Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables (1908), and Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna (1913), flourished. The fact that these titles are probably all familiar (even if we haven't actually read them) testifies to the enduring impact of this period of children's literature.

The ideologies embedded in children's books are therefore important to consider. For instance, in books for young children, the main characters are often animals. This could be said to reflect the ideology that children have a close connection to nature, and this connection should be encouraged, because it fosters a sense of care and responsibility to the environment. On the other hand, it could implicitly reveal a way of thinking about children as uncivilized and animal-like, particularly when the animals are considered cute but also pesky or unsanitary, such as mice, rats, and rabbits. Animals also have connotations carried over from their use in fables and fairy tales, so readers sometimes need to know some of those associations in order for them to fully understand the story.

There are also strong connotations related to gender. Of the books for older children mentioned in the previous paragraph, as well as many titles not mentioned, there is a tendency to relate boys to the adventure genre while girls are confined to domestic spaces. Additionally, in each of the stories mentioned, the girls perform the work of reforming their society, turning grumpy old folks into sentimental, generous benefactors, and healing their communities. Boys, on the other hand, light out for treasure and are not held responsible for nurturing community or family ties.

The other significant trend in these books is the prevalence of orphans as main characters—the girl characters are often orphans looking for a home, while the boy characters are orphans looking for travel and adventure. Even Dorothy, who has her successful adventure in Oz, is still drawn home in the end. Orphans are very common in children's literature, much more so than in contemporary society, which means that they are often orphaned to convey an idea rather than replicate real life. My daughter explained it to me this way when she was about 5 years old. She said, “Well, if the mother were alive, then she'd be the most important one in the story.” I think she has it right—in order for the main character to be independent and central to his or her own adventure, he or she must be unencumbered by parents, whose advice, support, and protection might solve the conflict for the main character, and then there would be no story. There is also psychological significance to the loss of parents, however, that we will explore further on.

2.4 The 20th Century and Beyond

Alongside quality children's books in the early 20th century grew the popular, consumer-driven side of children's literature. Comics, serialized sensational stories justly called “penny dreadfuls” (because they cost a penny and were in fact dreadfully cheesy), and dime novels (so-called because they cost a dime), were readily consumed by eager young readers. Serial novels were very popular, with series like Nancy Drew (1930–2003), the Hardy Boys (1927–2005), and the Bobbsey Twins (1904–1979) written by ghost writers who worked for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the first book packager to have a target audience of children rather than adults. Howard Garis's Uncle Wiggily first appeared in the Newark News in 1910 and starred in nearly 80 books and a board game before the author died in 1950.

These books, comics, and series novels are often recalled fondly by parents and grandparents and are passed on to their children as a result. They form what Deborah Stevenson (1997) has called a “canon of sentiment” (p. 112) as opposed to a “canon of significance (p. 113).” Books like the Berenstain Bears series (http://www.berenstainbears.com/), Mercer Mayer's Little Critter books (http://www.littlecritter.com/), and Ann M. Martin's The Baby-sitters Club (http://www.scholastic.com/thebabysittersclub/) often fall into the canon-of-sentiment category for today's college students. These books aren't necessarily high-quality literature, but they are fun, sometimes addictive reading for children and therefore encourage literacy development and create fond memories.

The war years (1914–1945), however, produced some highly memorable books for children, as adult authors turned to children's texts for a much-needed escape into the fantasy world of an idyllic childhood such as Winnie the Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood by A. A. Milne (1882–1956). Perhaps they were also trying to instill the values of a more peaceful world into their child readers in hopes for a more cooperative future or to fortify them for the challenges they might face in creating a more just world, such as we find in J. R. R. Tolkien's (1892–1973) Middle Earth or C. S. Lewis's (1898–1963) Narnia.

One text that explicitly addressed the anxieties of war for children in the 1930s is Munro Leaf's The Story of Ferdinand. Ferdinand is best known for his pacifism; unlike the other young bulls in his field, he is not at all interested in competing in the bullfights in Madrid, instead preferring to sit “just quietly” under his cork tree and smell the flowers. When a misunderstanding leads to his being chosen to fight, he still refuses, angering the banderilleros, picadores, and the matador, who have no choice but to send him home. This book, published within months of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, was considered political propaganda and was burned in Nazi Germany and banned in Spain, but has been in continuous print since its original publication and is still being taught today as a heartening fable of both nonconformity and nonviolence.

In the wake of the world wars, people had lost faith in the idea that humanity was becoming progressively more civilized and that technology was necessarily a sign of a glorious future. After all, advances in technology during the wars had mostly resulted in more efficient ways to kill more people at one time. The dark side of human nature was on full display, and Sigmund Freud's and Carl Jung's insights into that dark side, which were originally rejected by many in mainstream culture, were becoming more accepted by the 1950s as truth in the public and artistic imagination.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) is probably best known for his idea that people's actions are influenced by their “unconscious” mind—that is, a mental space that houses the instincts and impulses that we must repress in order to function in society. According to Freud, the id, that part of our mind that is driven by the pleasure principle, demands that we satisfy our appetites in order to reduce the tension that these appetites exert on us. Babies are entirely id driven; when they are hungry, they don't give any thought to where they are or whether it is convenient for them to be fed. Instead, they demand to be fed right that instant.

As babies grow older, they begin to develop a sense of self, which Freud called the ego, and a sense of right and wrong that comes from outside, which Freud referred to as the superego. The superego is revealed to children through parental discipline and rules but also through the rules and advice they receive through books and media. Children internalize these rules about how to behave and form a conscience that guides them in making decisions. In Freud's view, the role of the ego is to negotiate between the id and the superego; the ego has to constantly figure out how to satisfy the id's desires without getting in too much trouble with the superego. The healthy ego thus learns how to delay gratification or deny aggressive impulses. On the other hand, though, the healthy ego also figures out ways to satisfy desires in socially acceptable ways.

One practical application of Freud's ideas was the acknowledgement that children had much more complicated inner lives than people had previously given them credit for. Had Freud been a believer in God, he might have suggested that the idea of original sin wasn't so far off the mark as thinkers like Locke and Rousseau imagined. Instead he suggested that children were born self-absorbed and aggressively competitive and that they harbored murderous impulses against their rivals. Carl Jung (1875–1961) concurred, calling this dark side the Shadow, and both thinkers agreed that the purpose of art, on the individual as well as the social level, was to sublimate these desires into fantasies so that they could be acknowledged and worked through, exercised and exorcised, as it were, in socially harmless ways.

Consider the levels of aggression in a story like The Story of Babar the Little Elephant (1931), which contains what is certainly one of the most horrific scenes in children's literature—that of a mother elephant shot and killed while carrying her baby on her back. This illustration of a very common childhood fear—the loss of the mother—followed by the eventual triumph of Babar as he travels to the city, becomes a very urbane fellow indeed, and returns to his jungle family to be proclaimed as their king, takes child readers on an imaginary path from loss to recovery and offers reassurance that, even if children's worst fears are realized and they are left to fend for themselves in the world, there is still hope. While there are very complicated cultural problems with this book (Gopnik, 2008), at the psychological level, it acknowledges and addresses children's most traumatic fears and fervent hopes. Scores of 20th and 21st century children's texts treat the loss of the mother and its aftermath in similar ways.

Freudian and Jungian interpretations of folk and fairy tales also became common as a means of explaining the lasting appeal of these stories as well as thinking about how they might be useful for children. Jung believed that folk stories grew out of what he called the “collective unconscious,” which is something that each of us is born with that helps us organize experience. Characters that he called archetypes inhabit the collective unconscious and regularly show up in stories. Examples include the damsel in distress, the hero, the wise old man or woman, the trickster, the eternal child, the wicked witch or devil, the great mother. These character types are found in tales from cultures around the world. For instance, trickster figures include Anansi the Spider (West African), Brer Rabbit (African American), Coyote (Native American), Jack (Appalachian), John the Conqueror (African American), Kirikou (West African), Loki (Norse), Ma-ui (Polynesian), and Raven (Native American). Tricksters are especially appealing to young children because they are usually small in size and must use their cunning to overcome people more powerful than they are.

Like the cartoon images we will discuss in Chapter 3, these characters tend to be iconic. Because of this, children can project themselves and those they know onto characters in order to make the story theirs. When children listen to stories with these characters in them, they relate them to situations in their own lives, and this helps them organize experience—in any given situation, who are their helpers, who are their bad guys, and how should they deal with their conflicts? But as they grow older, they begin to realize that each of the attributes of these archetypes is present in themselves. According to Jungian psychology, our job is to integrate the characteristics of the archetypes into useful patterns that will help us in our daily lives. In other words, one way to think of a fairy tale in Jungian terms is to consider that each character represents an aspect of the self, and the story describes how each aspect might help or hinder growth and achieving goals.

In “Hansel and Gretel,” for instance, the children can represent the masculine and feminine qualities of the self. The stepmother, who fears that she won't have enough to eat and persuades her husband to get rid of the children, represents a fear of scarcity that can lead to despicable acts. The father is compassionate but ultimately too weak to counter fear. The children are resourceful, but also naïve, as they scatter breadcrumbs in an attempt to find their way back home. They then succumb to their own hunger and greed by attacking the witch's house. But it is the witch's greed that is the most destructive, as she plans to eat the children. As Hansel is placed in a cage to fatten up, both he and Gretel become tricksters, and Gretel demonstrates her bravery by killing the witch. The children find the witch's treasure and are ferried home by a pair of swans, where they find that their stepmother has died and they can therefore live happily ever after with their father. The characteristics of the characters thus include fear, compassion, naivety, hunger, greed, resourcefulness, trickiness, and bravery. The story demonstrates that fear, naivety, and greed must be overcome through resourcefulness, trickiness, and bravery so that compassion can ultimately triumph.

Freudian readings of fairy tales often focus on the relationship dynamics in the stories and how stories help children manage unconscious desires and conflicts. Freud suggested that children have socially unacceptable desires and conflicts. For instance, a toddler may show no interest in a toy until another toddler does, and then that toy becomes the only one worth having, and conflict ensues. One approach to such conflict would be to talk about the importance of sharing and perhaps read a story where the characters are happily cooperative and share all of their toys. Bruno Bettelheim (1903–1990), a Freudian child psychologist, disagrees with this approach. In The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1975), he argues that children need outlets for their negative emotions, and the best option for this is stories that openly acknowledge the intensity of those feelings. If children see only models of sweet, cooperative children in their books, and they themselves struggle with aggressive, angry feelings that get them in trouble, then they will begin to suspect that they are the only ones who have feelings like this. They will feel like monsters. But if they read stories where jealous, punishing evil stepmothers are killed, and valiant princes slay menacing monsters, their own inner demons can be vicariously soothed through the imaginative acting out of their aggressive impulses.

One of the literary milestones in the acknowledgement of aggression and psychological depth in children is found in the 1963 Caldecott Award-winning Where the Wild Things Are. In this familiar tale, the main character Max misbehaves, chasing his dog with a fork and making “mischief of one kind / and another” until his mother has had enough. She sends him to his room, where the aggrieved Max entertains an elaborate fantasy of getting his own back—that is, taking a troupe of wild things on a wild rumpus and then treating them the same way his mother treated him. In The Child That Books Built, Francis Spufford remarks that this is “one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger” (2002, p. 60); it is certainly one of the first children's books to do so. Molly Bang's When Sophie Gets Angry—Really, Really Angry is another book that acknowledges the intensity of child anger, just as Shaun Tan's The Red Tree acknowledges the depths of sadness that children are capable of, even if we as adults are reluctant to believe or acknowledge that children feel these emotions so deeply. Works like these owe a huge debt to Maurice Sendak for opening up the possibilities of children's literature to tackle serious emotional struggles.

The 20th century thus saw the dawn of a new interest in and respect for children, the complexity of their inner worlds, and their literature. Successful authors such as Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), T. S. Eliot (1888–1965), Countee Cullen (1903–1946), Langston Hughes (1902–1967), Arna Bontemps (1902–1973), and Carl Sandburg (1878–1967), began writing for children as well as adults. Oxford professors C. S. Lewis (1898–1963), author of the Chronicles of Narnia, and J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, not only wrote children's books but they also wrote about the art and practice of writing for children (Lewis, 1967; Tolkien, 1965). Taking issue with the idea that children need to be protected from fearful content, they side with British writer and philosopher G. K. Chesterton, who famously argued that “[f]airy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey” (1909), an idea that has been widely paraphrased as “Fairy tales are more than true—not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten” (quoted as the epigraph for the horror/fantasy novella Coraline, by Neil Gaiman [2002], and attributed to G. K. Chesterton).

But of course one of the most famous writers for children of the mid-20th century was Theodore Geisel (1904–1991), who adopted the pen name Seuss so that he could continue writing incognito for the college humor magazine after being caught drinking gin in his college dorm room (Nel, 2003). After he graduated, of course, he became Dr. Seuss. He began writing children's books in 1937, the first being And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, which was rejected by 27 publishers before it finally appeared from Vanguard Press. However, he continued to write children's books while he made a living doing advertising work and political cartoons. His many books for children are energetic, well-plotted, funny, and engaged with the psychology of young children.

The Development of Diversity in Children's Books

As authors began to take the inner and outer worlds of the child seriously, books for children became more diverse in their themes, characters, and genres. Realistic depictions of children in various socioeconomic settings took their place alongside the fantasies of the Golden Age as children's favorites. However, the books of the 20th century continued to point to some persistent ideologies of childhood, especially in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity.

Gender

If we start with the characters of Tom Sawyer (1876), Huck Finn (1884), and Peter Rabbit (1901), for instance, we can see that we view mischief as the birthright and special privilege of boys; these boy characters steal, disobey their elders, and run away from home, yet they are ultimately valued for their ability to get in and out of trouble. The bad boy archetype is repeatedly refreshed in characters like Curious George (who first appeared in 1941), Dennis the Menace (1951), Max from Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Calvin (1985) of Calvin and Hobbes fame, Bart Simpson (1987), and David (1997) from David Shannon's No, David books. Even Lenore Look's Alvin Ho (2008), who is much more fearful and less intentional about his misbehavior, manages to embody the archetype of the boy who always finds himself in trouble and always manages to be forgiven.

Not so with girl characters, at least until far later in the 20th and early 21st century. Lewis Carroll's Alice is curious, intelligent, and headstrong, but she is also prissy and insistent on protocol even as she questions the absurdity of the adults in Wonderland and, by implication, adult culture in the real world. Most girl characters of the Golden Age of children's literature, however, such as Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna (Pollyanna, 1913), L. M. Montgomery's Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables, 1908), and the numerous princesses in fairy tales, are rewarded for their meek goodness rather than their mischievous nature. It is not until the appearance of Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking in 1945 that girls really get their shot at the mischievous, anti-authoritarian life. Pippi challenges everything, from the superior strength of boys and men, to the authority of policemen, the intelligence of schooling, and the reserved protocols of polite society.

Ten years later, in 1955, Eloise (Eloise, by Kay Thompson) and Ramona (Beezus and Ramona, by Beverly Cleary) make their appearances, signaling that a real change has taken place in the way girls are depicted in children's literature, since Eloise and Ramona are realistic girls (that is, they don't have any supernatural powers) rather than fantasy heroes like Pippi. Like her predecessors, Eloise renders adult society absurd through her outrageous imitation of it, while Ramona's unsuccessful attempts to conform to social rules calls them into question by other means.

The character who really challenged the gender stereotype of the sweetly funny, good-natured girl, however, is Harriet, from Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy (1964). Harriet is a disturbing character because she is a girl who isn't at all nice or funny; indeed the only quality that she possesses that could be considered positive is her intelligence, which sets her apart and makes her judgmental of her peers rather than understanding and sympathetic toward them. When her beloved nanny leaves her and her friends discover her notebook, her nervous breakdown has a subtle and unsettling realism that sets her apart from most characters in children's literature. Despite the awareness of the complexity of children's inner lives, we still harbor the hope that their problems will be easily solved through the wisdom of adult intervention. Harriet is thus perhaps more the predecessor of the troubled heroine of young adult fiction rather than the culmination of heroines for younger readers. The legacy of Pippi, Eloise, and Ramona is more appropriately on display in characters like Barbara Park's Junie B. Jones (who first appeared in 1992), Lenore Look's Ruby Lu (2004), Annie Barrows' Ivy and Bean (2006), and Megan McDonald's Judy Moody (2000), who get into mischief and emerge unscathed, much like their male predecessors and counterparts.

Children's picturebooks have also responded to cultural changes in traditional family structures. Leslea Newman's (1989) Heather Has Two Mommies, and Michael Willhoite's (1991) Daddy's Roommate broke new ground with their positive portrayals of gay and lesbian family life. Since these books were published, many more have appeared that contain lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual content, as well as issues of losing a family member to AIDS, nontraditional families in general, children who don't follow traditional gender norms, and the experience of donor offspring. For a comprehensive, annotated list of books that feature gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual content, nontraditional families and children, and donor children, see New York librarian Patricia A. Sarles's blog: http://booksforkidsingayfamilies.blogspot.com/.

As the 20th century progressed, educators and parents became more aware of the importance of children being about to see positive portrayals of themselves, their cultures and lifestyles, and their problems, in books. In a survey of over 5,000 children's books published between 1962 and 1964, Nancy Larrick (1965) found that only 6.7% contained any reference to a non-White character in the text or the illustrations. That percentage has increased (Sims, 1982), however, and today there are many beautiful, affirmative picturebooks celebrating the family life and traditions of children from diverse backgrounds.

African Americans

Although the first books for children of color in America were published as early as 1890, the publishing history has been a rocky one. For instance, some of the first stories that featured non-White characters were by White authors and featured offensive stereotypes. For instance, Little Black Sambo was written in 1899 by a White woman named Helen Bannerman. Sambo is a South Indian child who, upon encountering four hungry tigers, gives up a piece of his colorful wardrobe to each tiger in exchange for their not eating him. The tigers then become jealous of each others' finery and chase each other in a circle with such ferocity that they melt into a pool of butter, which Sambo then eats with an enormous pile of pancakes after he recovers his clothes. It's easy to see why this story has appeal for children—a trickster figure outsmarts characters far more powerful and dangerous than himself and then ends up eating those who wanted to eat him. The imagery, however, was widely condemned as stereotypical and degrading to Black children. Sambo was depicted with very dark skin, a wide mouth and nose, startling white eyes, and unkempt hair; in other words, he embodied the pickaninny caricature, and his name, Sambo, became a racial slur.

Julius Lester, a noted Black author, had this heartbreaking reaction to the book:

When I read Little Black Sambo as a child, I had no choice but to identify with him because I am black and so was he. Even as I sit here and write the feelings of shame, embarrassment and hurt come back. And there was a bit of confusion because I liked the story and I especially liked all those pancakes, but the illustrations exaggerated the racial features society had made it clear to me represented my racial inferiority—the black, black skin, the eyes shining white, the red protruding lips. I did not feel good about myself as a black child looking at those pictures. (1997)

Lester's response was to write a new version of the book called Sam and the Tigers, illustrated by Jerry Pinkney. This version of the story preserves all of the wit and energy of the story, even amping up those characteristics, while stripping away the racist overtones.

Issues of representation became very important during the early and mid-20th century, which was characterized by the uplift tradition in African American literature, particularly for children. W. E. B. Dubois (1919) described what he called the “talented tenth,” that is, the 10% of Black people who would become world leaders through education and activism. In order to raise up a class of leaders, he started a children's magazine called The Brownies' Book in 1920, with the following seven purposes:

To make colored children realize that being ‘colored' is a normal, beautiful thing.

To make them familiar with the history of the Negro race.

To make them know that other colored children have grown into beautiful, useful, and famous persons.

To teach them delicately a code of honor and action in their relations with White children.

To turn their little hurts and resentments into emulation, ambition and love of their own homes and companions.

To point out the best amusements and joys and worthwhile things of life.

To inspire them to prepare for definite occupations and duties with a broad spirit of sacrifice. (p. 287)

The magazine's focus on noble behavior and didacticism makes it an unlikely breeding ground for popular child characters who, as we have noted, tend to have a bit of vinegar in their dispositions. However, its existence and goals indicate concern for the way Black children were represented in books and a need for positive role models and iconic characters. For more information and to read the issues of The Brownies Book, click here.

Indeed, the complaints leveled at books written about children of color throughout the early and mid-century focused on the fact that the characters almost always learn that growing up means learning to accept an inferior role in society, a lesson that boys like Jim Hawkins (of Treasure Island) and Tom Sawyer never have to learn (Harris, 1990; Kline, 1992). Given that, and the fact that even in a book featuring Black characters that won the Newbery Award, Sounder (by William H. Armstrong, 1969), only the dog is given a name, there are few models of Black childhood that snag a place on children's literature's greatest hits list. Armstrong, a White author, defends his choice to leave his characters nameless by saying that in doing so he creates characters that are universal, but the prejudice and harsh treatment of the family are clearly related to their ethnicity, so claims of universality in this situation falter. Albert Schwartz (1970) argues that the absence of names is related to the fact that long-standing racism has prevented the dominant culture from seeing people of color as individuals.

Since the 1990s, however, conditions have changed for the better. Today's children can listen to and read beautifully written picturebooks by Ashley Bryan, Lucille Clifton, Donald Crews, Eloise Greenfield, Nikki Grimes, Patricia McKissack, Walter Dean Myers, Faith Ringgold, Joyce Carol Thomas, Carole Boston Weatherford, and Jacqueline Woodson. Illustrators Bryan Collier, Floyd Cooper, E. B. Lewis, Christopher Myers, Kadir Nelson, Jerry Pinkney, and Javaka Steptoe have expanded the repertoire of possibilities for children's picturebook art with their innovative styles. These authors and illustrators, as well as many others, present personal stories, civil rights history, biographies, and folktales that highlight Black experience and culture. Fluent readers will find the folktale retellings and original early chapter books by Christopher Paul Curtis, Nikki Grimes, Virginia Hamilton, and Julius Lester challenging and fun. Since 1969, the American Library Association has been awarding the Coretta Scott King Award to outstanding African American authors and illustrators whose work demonstrates an appreciation for African American culture.

Latino/Latina and Hispanic Americans

Pérez and Martina: A Portorican Folk Tale, written by Pura Belpré in 1932, is usually considered the first children's book written by a Latina author in the United States. Belpré is most well-known as the first Puerto Rican librarian in the New York Public Library system, and her influence as a children's librarian, author, and storyteller has been honored by the American Library Association with the establishment of the Pura Belpré Award given to the Latino/Latina author and illustrator that “best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth” (para. 1).

Another important milestone in the representation of Latino/Latina culture in children's literature and media is the advent of Sesame Street, which featured human Latino/Latina cast members Miguel, Luis, and Maria as early as its second season in 1970. But despite the early publication of Belpré's work, the establishment of the award, and the presence of Latino/Latina characters in one of the most popular children's shows of all time, most critics agree that the publishing industry is not keeping up with the need for quality literature that addresses the expanding diversity of American culture, particularly the rapidly growing population of Latino/Latina children in America. Marisa Treviño (2012) attributes this to two factors: (1) that “[a]bout 75% of children's book buyers [in America] are white,” and (2) that the vast majority of published children's authors, over 90%, are White as well. She sees some positive change on the horizon, but such change will require enthusiastic advocacy on the part of educators and parents.

Another problem identified by critics is the lack of diversity within representations of Latino/Latina culture (see, for instance, the statistics at the bottom of Pat Mora's Bookjoy website: http://www.patmora.com./sampler.htm). Even the term—Latino/Latina—has a vexed history, since it seems to erase the rich diversity of traditions that emerge from the range of Latin American countries and cultures. It has come to be the preferred term over Hispanic, for instance, because Hispanic seems to privilege Spanish origin rather than Latin American. And many authors of Mexican heritage still refer to themselves as Chicano, a term that, since the 1960s and 1970s, connotes ethnic pride for many Mexican Americans as an expression of the uniquely hybrid nature of their culture. Phillip Serrato (2011) argues that the important thing for teachers to remember is that terms such as these are more often than not overly simplified conveniences for categorizing a range of books and that teachers should be attentive to the distinguishing characteristics of the books they share with children.

Despite these problems, there are still many respected Latino children's authors. Look for books by Alma Flor Ada, Francisco Alarcón, George Ancona, Monica Brown, Carmen Agra Deedy, Lulu Delacre, David Diaz, Pat Mora, Yuyi Morales, and Gary Soto for picturebooks, and Rudolfo Anaya and Carmen Lomas Garza for fluent readers.

Native Americans

Representation is also a problem with Native American texts, because our culture has tended to romanticize so much of the history of Native Americans. Lavish headdresses and costuming, which is often connected to sacred tribal tradition and not intended for public viewing or imitation, is used indiscreetly and irreverently in much children's literature. For instance, Susan Jeffer's Brother Eagle, Sister Sky (1991) is a wildly popular book that has inspired many a bulletin board, but it completely misrepresents the speech, questionably attributed to someone she calls Chief Seattle, from which she adapts her text, the message it contains, and the nation of the person who supposedly spoke the words. Jeffers uses a stylized stereotype of a Plains Indian to give a generic sense of “Indian-ness” to her book, and her nostalgic tone seems to insist that American Indians no longer exist, putting this book at the top of Oyate website's Books to Avoid (Seale, n.d.). Oyate is an organization that reviews children's literature and advocates for Native Americans/American Indians to be portrayed with historical accuracy, cultural appropriateness, and without anti-Indian bias and stereotypes.

The Oyate website (http://www.oyate.org/) offers guidance for teachers in evaluating books they might want to choose for inclusion in their curriculum. These guidelines could be easily adapted for considering any books about children of color. Another very useful resource is Debbie Reese's American Indians in Children's Literature blog (http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/), where she has book lists, articles, reviews, and news updates on issues affecting the representation of indigenous people in children's and young adult literature and culture. When considering which books to include in your curriculum, it is a good idea to consult these sources for specific recommendations as well as books and images to avoid. You will find books by Nicola Campbell, Joy Harjo, Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, and Tim Tingle consistently recommended for very young children, and Joseph Bruchac, Louise Erdrich, and Cynthia Leitich Smith as recommended authors of books for young readers.

Asian Americans

Like Latino/Latina children's literature, Asian American and Asian Heritage children's books represent a variety of cultural traditions and cultures. Unlike the other ethnicities we have discussed, however, the critical discussions around representation are not as robust or developed. While the majority of Asian American books for children today are folktales, there is a growing trend in realistic representations of Asian American children. Allen Say and Ken Mochizuki, for instance, write from the perspective of Japanese Americans, often focusing on the difficulties of assimilating to life in a new culture. Minfong Ho takes her very young readers to Thailand. Janet Wong writes poetry that honors her Chinese and Korean heritage while being grounded firmly in the universal landscapes of childhood dreams, hopes, and fears. There is also a growing body of literature featuring recent immigrants and adoptees and the challenges they face. For instance, My Name Is Yoon, by Helen Recorvits, and The Name Jar, by Yangsook Choi, both focus on young Korean girls entering American schools where their names present difficulties until they learn their value and meaning.

Choosing the Best Multicultural Children's Literature

According to statistics gathered by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, between the years of 1985 and 1993, the number of books created by African American authors increased dramatically. Since that time, however, the number of books by and about African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos has been trended downward (see Figure 2.1). As people who work with children, we must be intentional in ensuring that the literature we share with them reflects a full spectrum of experience. Publishing is a business, and while publishers may have strong ideological commitments, they must also respond to market demand. If we want a robust supply of quality multicultural books, we must ensure that we are creating sufficient demand for them.

Research shows that children develop their most persistent attitudes toward race when they are 3–7 years old, and that not talking about racial issues is more detrimental toward developing an open attitude toward diversity than explicit discussion, even in schools and neighborhoods where diversity is the norm (Vittrup, 2007). Children are not color-blind: They notice racial difference, and they overwhelmingly prefer people who look similar to themselves, but we adults are the ones who teach them what skin color means. Vague, color-blind statements such as “we are all equal” mean little to children, but explicitly showing doctors, rescue workers, or plumbers, say, with a variety of skin colors or both genders, and talking about their representations, is much more effective. Passive exposure has also been disproven as a means of promoting mixed-race interaction in schools; rather, children must be encouraged to talk about racial difference as we have learned to talk about gender difference (Bronson & Merryman, 2009).

Guidelines for Evaluating Diversity in Children's Books

Accurate representation of cultural specifics: Are countries of origin specifically named where appropriate? (For instance, Africa is not a country, nor is Latin America.) Does the style of dress represent time period accurately? Do pictured setting details accord with textual setting? Do the intergenerational relationships depicted reflect the values prevalent in the culture? (For instance, respect for elders, importance of extended families, etc.)

Avoidance of stereotypes: Are characters depicted as individuals? Are characters shown in a variety of activities, with a variety of skin tones and body types? Pay particular attention to gender—are men and women always shown performing activities traditionally thought of as male or female activities, or do they behave in ways that more accurately represent the contemporary diversity of roles?

Achievement: Are characters shown to be resourceful and able to solve their own problems? Are authority figures diverse in terms of ethnicity and gender? Are power dynamics equally distributed among characters of various ethnicities and genders?

Author/Illustrator: Does the author/illustrator come from the culture depicted? If not, is there evidence that sufficient research has been done regarding the portrayal of the culture? It is useful to check reviews for this information if it is not provided in the author's/illustrator's note.

Copyright Date: Generally speaking, the newer the book, the more likely it will address cultural issues with contemporary sensibilities.

Sensibility: If the book portrays a struggle between a minority character and the dominant culture, does the book give appropriate weight to the conflict and the minority character's right to justice, even if that right challenges the status quo or laws of the dominant culture?

Language: Does the language of the characters and/or the narrator accurately reflect, but not stereotype, typical language use in that culture?

Icons and Children's Media Today

Children's authors and illustrators today are sensitive to the exciting challenges of living in a world where gender roles are more fluid and cultural differences are increasingly valued. While some authors, such as Mo Willems, are creating new icons of child culture, such as the Pigeon, Knuffle Bunny, and Elephant and Piggie, in some cases, the authors themselves are becoming icons, such as, again, Mo Willems, with children eagerly awaiting the next offering by Kevin Henkes or Kadir Nelson. These authors have an almost unlimited range of artistic tools available to them, and they are re-creating the picturebook as a work of art, shaping the aesthetic vision of child readers in diverse and fascinating ways. Children's picturebooks today are more sophisticated than they have ever been, offering visual and verbal challenges that demonstrate an unprecedented respect for the cognitive and affective abilities of child readers.

In today's media-saturated culture, whether characters become children's literature icons often depends on whether they are picked up for TV and movies. The Walt Disney Company, for example, is largely responsible for keeping the fairy tale princess alive and well in contemporary culture. Disney's remakes of classic fairy tales have been criticized for their perpetuation of impossible ideals of feminine beauty, as their wasp-waisted, big-eyed beauties set the standard for pretty among young girls. However, what seems to bother people most about Disney is their overwhelming hold on children's culture. The “Disney version” of any particular story is likely to be the one children are most familiar with, and thus, to their minds, the “right” version. For instance, Disney's bright, colorful image of Winnie the Pooh with his ill-fitting T-shirt and very chubby tummy is very different from the original illustrations by E. H. Shepard . Although the first movies Disney produced were very respectful of the book, their continual repackaging of Pooh over the years has diminished the power of those original stories, making contemporary Pooh a very silly bear indeed.

Other purveyors of children's literature and culture have created cultural icons as well. For instance, the Sesame Street characters are widely recognized around the world. Interestingly, these characters have gone from TV to books, rather than the other way around like such characters as Marc Brown's Arthur, Rosemary Wells's Max and Ruby, Susan Meddaugh's Martha, and Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat. The main purveyors of children's media today are Disney, Nickelodeon, and PBS. While each network, producer, and distributor has a slightly different emphasis and mission statement, their products are marketed across the spectrum of child culture, creating books, TV shows, music, stage shows, amusement parks, toys, games, and play sets to immerse children in the world of their products and gain brand loyalty. As we look more closely at media specifically targeted to the various age groups, we will discuss the philosophy and dominant aesthetic statements of each of these purveyors more closely. For the most part, though, these media outlets are competing for market share while attempting to maintain their ideal of what children should and should not experience through their storytelling.

PBS, for instance, has very clear guidelines regarding their children's television programming (http://www.pbs.org/producers/pbskidssubmissionguidelines.pdf). They have a clearly articulated “Child Development and Learning Framework” that all of their programs must be responsive to, and they encourage periodic evaluation through focus groups to see if the program's goals are having the desired effects on child learning. They also have a list of specific prohibitions in children's programming. Violence of any kind, as well as any dangerous or illegal behavior that children might model, are prohibited, as is any sort of image or programming that might evoke fear in children. They also put strict limits on “grossness” and images of bathroom use; clearly, the Shrek franchise could not be distributed through PBS. PBS also has explicit guidelines against racial and gender stereotyping and insists that any depictions of antisocial behavior be portrayed with negative consequences.

Disney, on the other hand, places its emphasis on creativity, innovation, and profitability. Their official website (http://thewaltdisneycompany.com/) highlights this mission across all of their businesses and programs. Their focus is now and always has been on creative and memorable storytelling. This means that they will occasionally present fearful images and violent scenes in their films, although they do find ways to imply the more gratuitous scenes of violence rather than actually show what happens. For instance, when the wicked queen falls to her death in Disney's first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), all the audience sees are two very interested vultures watching over the edge of the cliff. Likewise, some 50 years later, Gaston falls off a rain-soaked roof after stabbing the Beast in Beauty and the Beast (1991), but viewers do not witness either his entire fall or his landing. The Beast survives the stabbing and is transformed back into his former self. Violent deaths are actually quite common in animated Disney films, but they always function within the storytelling role of vanquishing villains who deserve to be vanquished.

PBS and the Disney-ABC Television Group represent two extremes in children's media programming. PBS's focus is explicitly on providing developmentally appropriate educational media that emphasizes social equality and explicitly rejects stereotyping. Disney's focus is on creative storytelling, which requires the use of icons and archetypes, if not stereotypes, so that children are drawn into identifications. Other purveyors of children's media fall somewhere in between. For instance, Nickelodeon, which is owned by Viacom, places a high emphasis on humor and the empowerment of viewers, which they promote through online interaction, viewer's choice programming and awards, and gaming. They then claim to use their influence to promote healthy lifestyles by using their well-known characters, like Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants, to encourage exercise through their “Let's Just Play” campaign (Altschuler, 2008). While many of the shows distributed through these outlets end up seeming similar, it is nonetheless possible to detect their various commitments by watching with an analytical eye.

Children's literature has a long history of availability in audio and visual formats, including touch-and-feel books, pop-ups, lift-the-flap, and other formats that encourage interaction. The development of digital technologies offers exciting possibilities for children's reading in the future. Color versions of e-readers offer a natural platform for picturebooks, and YouTube has any number of videos that feature people telling stories, reading children's books, setting them to music, and adapting them in various child-friendly ways. Many local public library websites also feature online children's books that children can access for free from a computer. For instance, explore Tumblebooks at http://www.normalpl.org/online-tools/kids/.

Apps are also being developed based on children's books. Some of these are similar to the computerized versions of children's books that first became available in the 1980s in that they offer options for being read to or reading alone, hot spots with animations, and the ability to receive the story in other languages. Because these new apps have been developed for tablets, they include features that are activated by swiping and shaking the tablet as well. Some include interactive features, such as Mo Willems' Don't Let the Pigeon Run This App, based on his popular pigeon character. This app allows children to record their answers to questions and create new stories in a fill-in-the-blank fashion, where players are asked for specific kinds of words to fill in blanks that can be saved and replayed. And of course, Disney offers a wide range of apps based on its recent movies. Many nonfiction apps are also available that encourage children to learn through interactive edutainment.

Most exciting, perhaps, though is the development of augmented reality (AR) children's books. These books use a webcam (or other device such as a camera phone) to project 3-D images that have been encoded in the book itself. In addition, readers can interact with the image in their books. It really must be seen to be fully understood. You'll find videos demonstrating AR in Websites to Save and Explore at the end of the chapter.