5 - “Children are the future”

Summary

“You are holding the future; one must be kind to the future … So this is the seduction of normalcy.”

Maggie Nelson

“If only it were easier to feel that happiness and unhappiness are completely equal, or that they aren't rivals, that to be unhappy is not to have failed at life, but just to be living (for the moment) in one of the many ways people live …”

Emily Berry

One of my roles at Drummond Hall is to organize the school library, to check the books don't contain excessive descriptions of violence or explicitly sexual themes. Having age-appropriate books is especially important in a setting where the readers may have been subject to domestic abuse, traumatic bereavement or sexual assault (all mainstays, in various ways, of children's literature – think of the orphans, the kidnappings and murders). Acknowledging this is to acknowledge that stories can have real and sometimes harmful effects on their readers.

What is omitted, what is glossed over, can be as harmful as what's included. In an oft-cited TED Talk from 2009, the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses “the danger of a single story”. When literature repeats tropes and stereotypes it reinforces social expectations. If step-mothers are exclusively described as evil, child-hating women (a common motif in fairy tales), this will contribute to a general suspicion of step-mothers. Social critics like Darren Chetty and Melanie Ramdarshan Bold have used Adichie's line of argument to critique popular children's literature. Historically, for instance, there has been a distinct absence of queer and Black and brown protagonists in children's books, which (they argue) has reinforced expectations for heroes to be white and heterosexual.

Books, film, television, and other cultural products articulate and reinforce what is and isn't normal. They establish “norms”, rules and ways of being, and these can negatively affect children by setting unrealistic expectations or promoting certain ideas or attitudes over others. These norms affect the rest of us too. They’re more than “mere” social constructs.