What Happened to Difficult Children's Books?

 

I recently gave my ten-year-old daughter a book I remember from my own childhood. She didn't like it, and honestly, it didn't surprise me. I hadn't liked it either when I read it the first time; I was about her age.

However, I didn't exactly remember the story, so I decided to pick it up again, almost thirty years later.

Going Back

The book was Os Olhos de Ana Marta by Portuguese writer Alice Vieira. There isn't really an English edition, so I'll loosely translate the title as Ana Marta's Eyes.

I remembered the book as strange and frightening. Even disturbing. What I didn't remember was why.

My daughter is an avid reader, and eventually we ran out of books at home that she hadn't already read. So I went to my mother's house and brought back some books from my own childhood.

There they were: books I had read when I was roughly her age, books that had survived in my memory for decades. And among them was Ana Marta's Eyes.

The funny thing is, reading it again, I felt some discomfort. This wasn't really a children's story about something frightening. It was a story about grief.

The book I couldn't understand as a child

The protagonist's parents have lost a child in a car accident.

They haven't recovered.

Her mother, in particular, is trapped in her grief. She struggles to connect with her daughter. She doesn't even want to be called "Mum." She has episodes and emotional crises that the child cannot possibly understand.

As a child, I experienced those things as frightening.

As an adult, I could finally see what was underneath them.

Pain.

An unbearable amount of pain. And then comes the terrible realization for the girl: what exactly is her place in this family? Would she exist if her sister had not died? Was she, in some sense, a replacement? A spare part? And if she was supposed to fill someone else's place, how could she ever compete with the child who died?

The dead become perfect in our memories. They don't grow up. They don't disappoint us. They don't make mistakes. They remain frozen at the age at which we lost them. How can a living child compete with that?

She can't.

This is where the book becomes incredibly painful. It's not about the supernatural scary stories the maid tells the girl; it is about the most human of feelings. A child is trying to understand whether she is loved for who she is, or because she occupies an empty space.

Those are not particularly comfortable thoughts to give a ten-year-old. But maybe that was the point.

My daughter didn't have the context I did

I lost someone very young who was, in many ways, a second father to me. So some of the emotions in this book weren't completely foreign to me, even as a child. They were painful, but I recognized something in them.

My daughter hasn't had that experience. Thankfully. So when she encountered this story, her reaction was very different.

Why doesn't the mother like her? Why does she behave like that? Why does the dead sister matter so much? How can a mother look at her own daughter and still be unable to see her?

Those are difficult questions to explain to a ten-year-old who has never experienced that kind of loss.

And it made me wonder something I hadn't expected to wonder while rereading an old children's book:

Should children be exposed to these things?

Should we let them encounter grief, death, abandonment, mental illness, loneliness, and complicated family relationships through fiction? Or should childhood be a protected space where those things remain outside for as long as possible?

I genuinely don't know.

From grief to Greg

The contrast became even more obvious when I thought about the books my daughter normally reads.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Dork Diaries... funny situations, embarrassing parents, school problems, friendships, crushes and disasters that feel enormous at ten but are, generally speaking, wonderfully insignificant in the great circle of life.

And that's not a criticism. Children need that too. They need to laugh. They need stories where the worst thing that can happen is being humiliated at school or getting into trouble.

Even Grandpa's Great Escape, which deals with dementia and loss, approaches difficult subjects through humor, warmth, and adventure.

There is a fundamental difference between these stories and Ana Marta's Eyes. And perhaps that difference tells us something about how childhood itself has changed.

We used to prepare children for the world

This is where I need to be careful, because I don't want to fall into the very easy trap of saying that everything was better when I was a child.

It wasn't.

My generation had plenty of things children shouldn't have had to deal with.

We were often expected to tolerate things simply because adults considered them part of life. We were told to get over things. We weren't always listened to. We weren't always protected.

That isn't inherently healthier.

But I do think things have changed tremendously.

Our parents often seemed to prepare us for the world. Today, we often try to prepare the world for our children.

We remove the scary bits. We soften the language. We explain difficult situations in increasingly careful ways. We worry about what might frighten them. And there is something beautiful about that. Children deserve protection.

But protection has a side effect: they become very inexperienced - sometimes inept - at dealing with things that cannot be protected against.

Because eventually, the world stops cooperating. Someone dies, or gets sick. Someone leaves. Eventually they'll deal with rejection. A friendship ends. A relationship breaks. A person we love suffers.

And suddenly there is no age-appropriate version of grief.

There is just grief.

Are we creating fragile adults?

This is the question that keeps bothering me.

Not because I think books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid are making children fragile, nor because I think exposing children to traumatic subjects automatically makes them stronger. - It doesn't.

But I do wonder whether, as a society, we sometimes confuse protecting children from difficult experiences with teaching children how to deal with difficult experiences.

Those are not the same thing.

And as a psychologist, I find that distinction particularly interesting.

We talk much more openly about mental health now. We recognize emotions that previous generations ignored. We have a much better vocabulary for anxiety, boundaries, trauma and emotional wellbeing.

That is progress.

At the same time, younger generations are experiencing enormous levels of psychological distress.

Does one cause the other?

I don't think we can make that leap. It would be far too simplistic to say that children are struggling because their books are too funny or because parents protect them too much. Countless social, economic, technological, and cultural factors are involved.

But I do think the question is worth asking:

What happens when we teach children that difficult feelings should always be avoided rather than experienced and understood?

The vocabulary of pain

I noticed something else when I reread the book: the language.

Ana Marta's Eyes doesn't just tell a child what happens. It gives her words for things that are difficult to name - Grief, Absence, Resentment, Guilt, Loneliness, Jealousy.

The strange feeling of loving someone and being angry with them at the same time.

The fear that something about you isn't enough.

My daughter reads beautifully written books now, but so much of her reading is designed primarily to entertain her. Again, there is nothing wrong with that, but literature can do another job: it can give us vocabulary for experiences we haven't had yet.

You don't need to experience everything before you can understand it. Sometimes you can meet an emotion in a book first.

Would I give the book to my daughter again?

This is where being a mother and being a psychologist pull me in slightly different directions.

As a mother, I wanted to give my daughter another book by Alice Vieira; then I thought about it, and I hesitated.

What if it is another book I remember differently? What if I am remembering the story and not the emotional weight of it? What if I give her something that is simply too much for where she is now?

But as a psychologist, I also see the value.

The difficult vocabulary. The emotional complexity. The opportunity to talk about grief without actually having to experience it. The possibility of discovering that people can behave badly while still being deeply hurt.

That adults don't always know how to deal with their own pain. That loving someone doesn't automatically make us good at loving them.

Those are complicated lessons, but they are also real ones, and maybe children don't need to be protected from every complicated thing. What they do need is an adult beside them while they encounter some of those things.

There is a difference.

The books changed. So did we.

When I was ten, Ana Marta's Eyes scared me.

At ten, my daughter simply didn't like it.

At forty-one, I found it heartbreaking.

Same book. Three completely different experiences.

This is easily explained. Books don't exist independently of the people reading them. We bring our experiences to them. Our fears. Our losses. Our understanding of other people.

My daughter read a story about a mother who couldn't love her properly and thought, essentially, Why would a mother do that?

I read the same story and thought, She is drowning in grief.

Neither of us was wrong. We were simply reading from completely different places.

Our idea of what childhood should be has also changed.

We seem to have decided that children should have more laughter, more safety, more emotional protection and fewer encounters with the uglier parts of life.

Maybe that's healthier. Maybe it is exactly what children need. Or maybe children also need stories that occasionally make them uncomfortable. Stories that don't give them easy answers.

We are raising children differently from the way we were raised, and they will probably become adults who function differently than we did.

That doesn't necessarily mean better. It doesn't necessarily mean worse. Just different.

Maybe that is something we won't understand until they're adults, looking back at our books and wondering what on earth we were thinking.

For now, though, I have a ten-year-old daughter, a pile of books from my childhood, and one question I can't quite get rid of:

When we protect children from the difficult parts of life, are we protecting their childhood—or postponing their preparation for adulthood?