Reactions to Playful Reading and Childhood
One of the hardest and amazing things in children’s literature is its ability to explain the complicated and multifarious world of social correlations to those who only enters this big world and learns all its perplexities. It is wondering how important children’s literature is as its primary purpose is to guide kids through the world of human relationships, it blurs the boundaries between adults and children step by step in its special gentle way. Children’s literature provides both entertainment and intellectual engagement which is important for the development of every child. It transmits important issues and themes and thus helps to create personal opinion and provides emotional development. However, children’s literature is the only kind of literature which is not directly written by the insiders of its audience. This fact makes it distinctive and adds a lot of responsibility. Children usually do not choose what book to read by themselves, and the choice depends on whether the book passes through the judgments of several adults. An adult is an author, the publisher, the promoter, more likely a buyer and what even more the one who read this book to a child.
Children’s literature is a representation of how adult see their responsibility toward children by shaping their views and beliefs through book choices. Mary Galbraith investigates children’s social situation by learning emancipatory approach to the children’s literature. She claims that children are silenced groups as well as the females in developing countries. Though in some aspects children’s opinion is taken into consideration, it is rather formalistic than seriously accepted since adults have the absolute authority on what children read. However, while females can fight for emancipation, children cannot emancipate themselves from adults because of their dependence and inability to live without exterior help. Galbraith suggests that there is no need to treat children as the adults, it is about to change the way society perceives children and recognize their need. It can be established through the practice of “aware parenting” (Galbraith, Mary 188) which means nonviolent communication, accepting child’s opinion, providing a safe space to express their feelings. Despite serious disagreements and the fact that emancipatory theories are being argued, the one claim which stays undisputable is that children’s situation should be understood from the first-person point of view. Adults should transform themselves and their practices by reconsidering the emancipation as a socializing model for children through a reevaluation of personal childhood experience (Galbraith, Mary 187-205).
What resonates me from the study of Mary Galbraith is the veracity of her ideas which have the reflection in my personal experience as a child not having an opportunity to choose what to read and being forced to read what was considered as a better choice for me by others. I cannot tell it was suffering because adults are treated as an authority on children, and I thought that people around me know what is better for me as they are more …