Reflection On The Children's Story

Children’s literature is the precedent for the development of all children. Children’s literature varies from poetry to children’s picture books. Every aspect of children’s literature gives an ability to grow a child mentally and develop their ideas and imagination. In early literature, children were romanized to be perfect and well behaved. Author Maurice Sendak counters the idea of a perfect child in his book “Where The Wild Things Are”. Sendak uses his picture book to illustrate a child’s ability to have feelings of anger, resentment, and frustration. The interviewer, Patrick F. Roughen of Red Feather Journal states that“Where the Wild Things Are (1963) contains some of the earliest attempts in children’s literature to represent the intrapsychic challenges of the lives of children. Anger, frustration, and the complexities of parent-child relationships can be found throughout its pages”. “Where the Wild Things Are” reinforces the idea that children are capable of emotions that one would imagine are only depicted in the adult world.

I remember the first day of Kindergarden very clearly; I walked into a facility covered with white walls, white tiling, and white children, but I looked a little different from the other children. I was the only Chinese American male in a predominantly white schooling created me to become an easy target for other children. Persecution, stereotypes, and identity was placed on me each day, and I resorted to my parents for comfort. I would cry into my mother’s arm and ask her “how do I make my eyes bigger?” or “Can you just buy me some blue eyes?”. My mother would cry along with me, but it wasn’t until after multiple attempts of begging that I understood the burden and pain I was putting on her heart, and I stopped asking. Each day when I was asked how my day went, I would lie and tell her how “amazing” it was, but I was truly hurting inside. This started my

In “A Barred Owl” by Richard Wilbur and “The History Teacher” by Billy Collins, adults provide easy explanations for children when confronted with harsh realities. Both works explore the use of white lies to respond to children’s fear and curiosity in an attempt to preserve their innocence. However, the writers employ literary devices that convey these concepts in different ways. While Wilbur presents parents’ well-intentioned untruths as beneficial to a child’s peace of mind, Collins reveals the serious consequences of a teacher’s trivial fabrications.

Parents often say, “Listen to your elders.” This cliché can make some people apathetic, but when looking back, most appreciate the wisdom of their elders. The knowledge imparted to children is crucial for their ability to understand and improve the world. In XIV by Derek Walcott, the speaker uses imagery, metaphor, and other literary devices to convey the storyteller’s significance to his life.

Lisa often gets frustrated when trying to play with other children. She takes toys from their hands and even hits children with the toys.

This is an excellent example of when the pressure of meeting our mothers’ expectations do more harm than good to -us- their children. It ended up shaping the narrator’s career, leading to more misery than

Obviously from the title of this book, this excerpt is intended for children; for that reason, the text is exceedingly easy to read and understand. In fact, the first thing I noticed about this particular excerpt is the simplistic sentence structure and elementary word choice. Since the intended audience is young children, the short sentences and uncomplicated words reflect that. The author, William Carus Wilson, knew that kids have a very little attention span, so he made each sentence brief and to the point. And his consideration of children’s limited vocabulary made him use simple words like good or bad to describe objects. Another thing I picked up on in my annotations, is that the author uses underlying rhetoric techniques to influence the way kids think. He attempts to convince audience justified racism through nationalism,

Children’s literature is an effective teaching tool for children but also a way for children to escape their daily lives through fantasy. Didactic material can be used to teach life lessons, manners and morals where subversive and fantasy genres can allow children to release from daily expectations and allows an outlet for their large imaginations.

Well-written and inspirational literature not only has the ability to carry a reader into another world but they are able to accomplish this feat while simultaneously delivering deep messages that surpass the written text. Children’s literature is sometimes overlooked in terms of reaching these standards and being considered worthy of critical analysis; this genre is often perceived as having juvenile storylines and concepts portrayed through simplistic language. However, the common writing styles in children’s literature, often being either illustrated books or picture-books, offer the genre with a unique opportunity to achieve deep themes and messages through the dynamic

Over the last thirty years, the idea of children as witnesses and the accuracy of their testimony has been widely debated. People are asking themselves if the memories of young children, specifically between the ages of five and ten, can be accurate and in return trusted. So, can children’s memory and testimony be accurate? Prolific amounts of research have been conducted in an attempt to answer this question. Most of the research suggests that unfortunately we can not rely on their accurate recall in testimony. I would have to say I agree with the findings.

This charming story reverses the typical roles within a children’s book. With underlying issues of stereotypes, independence and empowerment, it fills children with imagination and teaches them the importance of being strong, smart, and the realization that beauty comes from within.

Although many view children's fiction as suitable only to children, and an embarrassingly immature pursuit for a serious person, children' stories mold the way we think. They allows us to look at very complex and difficult issues in a safe and playful way, and they give us the freedom to imagine the unimaginable.

“It takes a village to raise a child” (Goldberg). This old African proverb justifies that the upbringing of a child is a communal effort. The exposure to society and growing accustomed to the realities of life are beneficial to the growth of a child. These words hold a symbolic meaning to the importance of society and morality. Turning a blind eye to these words of wisdom deprive children of their understanding of humanity. This signifies the innocence of a child growing up in isolation as in Donoghue’s Room. Emma Donoghue uses her novel Room to illustrate that morality is a construct of society and growing up in isolation significantly narrows a child’s perception of life. Living in a

Through the eyes of society everyone has a set role they are expected to fulfill and certain characteristics they are supposed to exemplify. These roles and characteristics, this discourse, tells everyone how they should act and speak. For women it is the role of the mother. In our culture, that means raising the children, completing the household chores, and cooking all of the meals to perfection. Women are typical thought of as being demure and polite, small in stature, and submissive to the male gender. In the reverse, men also have certain roles that they are expected to fill and characteristics they are supposed to exemplify. Men are expected to be strong, dominant, and in charge of their families. They are often depicted, both in the media and in life, as the leaders. This discourse that we all follow can frequently be seen in Svava Jakobsdottir’s “A Story for Children.” The short story tells the tale of a woman as she raises her children and takes care of her household. The mother is completely devoted to her children and seeks to fulfill her role in the home to the fullest extent. As the story progresses, the main character slowly has pieces of herself removed by her children: her toe, her brain, and finally her heart. At the end of the text, after all of the children have become adults started families of their own, the mother realizes that she now has nothing and feels useless. In her short story, Jakobsdottir uses dramatization to depict the gender stereotypes and

As a young child grows older, parents tend to give the child stories with more meaning. Often parents fill their child’s desire for a story with a moral story. Again this phenomenon tends to cross cultural lines. Every culture seems to have a set of morals in which they abide. Furthermore they tend to have stories that demonstrate the moral in action. Young children are told such stories orally. Whether or not the story was written in a book has little effect on the power of it. And whether or not the story is written down in a book before that child grows up to tell it to his/her child is irrelevant. The story, told over and over to generation after generation, has become a part of literature.