A Child's Reality

I haven't even attended all my classes yet, but already my mind is a flurry of activity from the start of the new semester.

Yesterday I had both the first session of my Theory Development class and the Children's Lit class I'm TA-ing with my advisor (he's doing most of the teaching).

For Theory Development some of our readings talked about the nature of reality. Is there an objective reality that exists independent of observation, or is reality constructed by observers?

Then in Children's Lit we had a discussion about what makes a book children's literature, and one of the ideas thrown around was that it represents a child's reality. None of the things listed could have applied to all children's literature, so this wasn't an absolute either. But Dr. Seuss was brought up as a counter-example. Are those a child's reality? Outrageous situations and nonsense words?

Challenge accepted.

In Knucklehead, Jon Scieszka's autobiography, Mr. Scieszka has a chapter on children's books. As a child, he thought that Dr. Seuss books were much more like his life than Dick and Jane books. Dick and Jane were weirdos who talked funny and laughed at inappropriate times.

This isn't just Scieszka being silly. He's on to something.

Children, especially young children, see new, miraculous, previously-thought impossible things every day. My two and a half year old son, Horatio, saw me shuffle cards for the first time a couple weeks ago. The look on his face... I might as well have been a talking cat, standing on a ball, balancing toys, books, and fish on various appendages. Dr. Seuss's strange scenarios respect the fact that children encounter regularly things we take for granted as normal, but to them seem extraordinary.

There are also plenty of good reasons for the nonsense words, but one of them could be that they also represent a child's reality. Think of all the words kids hear all the time that they don't yet know. To them large chunks of what adults say must sound like nonsense. But we keep on using all those words anyway, whether children understand them or not. Eventually they learn them from context. And they know what Dr. Seuss's words mean, too.

Dr. Seuss books better represent children's reality than "realistic" books do. They also tell kids that this astounding world they live in is fun. It is meant to be played with. If only adults could live in that reality as well.