Childhood

It is difficult to grasp only five theories that make up children's literature because I feel that there is so much more that goes into it for that age group. When you are young, you look up to the main people in your life, you want to be an action hero in a comic book and you soak up everything like a sponge. However, the imagination of a child can go beyond any piece of paper and pen. Therefore, there are numerous key factors that go into play when it comes to children's literature. I am going to give my opinion on which I believe stand out more than the rest.

My first theory is that every child's book is family based. This could be because the authors want to get the message of a family unit across to the children. Every children's novel has some sort of family member to the main character. Also, the author wants to get the message across to the children of how important being a family is. Secondly, I feel that responsibilities play a key role in a children's novel. There is always something in a child's novel that relates to responsibilities that the main character had not taken care of. This is wanting to teach a child that there are always consequences of your actions in not taking responsibility. By doing so, children will want to be viewed as an adult or a more mature individual because they are taking care of their responsibilities, "stages in the process of making an adult identity". ( Sanchez- Eppler) Next, when it came to the characters in each novel they were meant to "teach, and more specifically, teach morality".(Macleod). Meaning that the child would be able to learn right from wrong, and instilling in thier minds to make the correct moral discions fro the rest of their life. Also, repitive stories were told with "good characters contrasted with bad"( Macleod). What is the reason for doing so? This is done to insure that the child knows the good character will always end up the content one, and the bad character would always have the sad ending. Fouthly, my theory comes from Eppler's Dependent States which goes into detail about why adults were the ones who wrote the children's literature because they wanted total control over what the children were being exposed to and learning. They felt that children were not mature enough to write or express any issues of importance into a story. Adults did so because they were attempting to slowly mold together the perfect children, but that did not happen. My last theory is that children are "forces of socialization: ideas about childhood and the innocent figure of the child evoked in wide range of cultural and political discourses in attempts to reform, direct, or influence thenation" (Sanchez- Eppler). This tells a person a little bit about what was going on for the Average American during the 19th Cetury. The Unites States was going through a shift in this time era because more famers were leaving everything behind and taking theirfamilies into the larger cities with moral corruption. However, the authors would try to lead the children to treat others the way they would want to be treated, and have higher values and morals because they felt that is what was getting lost. The authors were attempting to bring back the more family valued times, and they were trying to bring it back through the children.