Feeling Like a Kid by Jerry Griswold

In Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature, Jerry Griswold argues that the reason why some children’s books are so successful is because they really capture that it feels like to be a child.

And what does it feel like to be a child? Griswold identifies five areas that are essential parts of children’s experiences, and devotes a chapter to each: snugness (children’s fondness for small, cosy places), scariness, smallness (not only how a child’s size influences his or her perception of the world, but also children’s attraction to miniature things), lightness (children’s frequent dreams of flying, levitating, etc) and aliveness (young children’s conviction that everything in the universe is alive and self-aware).

In each of the chapters, he illustrates his point with examples from children’s classics such as The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan, Where the Wild Things Are, or the works of Beatrix Potter, and also from more recent works like Harry Potter.

I think my favourite chapter was the one on scariness. This is how it begins:

Adults, in my experience, don’t like to have pointed out to them that childhood is a very scary time and the world of Children’s Literature a very scary place. Forgetting their own childhoods, many grown-ups prefer a sentimental notion of childhood, where happy youngsters inhabit a trouble-free country and the sun is always shining. In a similar way, adults often have a saccharine notion of Children’s Literature as sweet and cute, but to maintain that illusion they have to seize on happy and upbeat moments and race over events of the other kinds.

I think this is absolutely true. In my experience, adults are sometimes not the best judges of what children will find too scary, too upsetting, or disturbing. Each child has their own limits, of course, but a little scariness can be stimulating, both intellectually and emotionally.

A few pages ahead he mentions the poem “Children Selecting Books in a Library” by Randall Jarrell, which I read online and fell in love with. I especially love the ending:

What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann's
Way better than our own, an trudge on at the back
Of the north wind to -- to -- somewhere east
Of the sun, west of the moon, it is because we live
By trading another's sorrow for our own; another's
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own ...
"I am myself still?" For a little while, forget:
The world's selves cure that short disease, myself,
And we see bending to us, dewy-eyed, the great
CHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared.

One of my favourite things about Feeling Like a Kid (and the reason why I picked it up to begin with, I have to say) is the fact that it’s full of illustrations from children’s books. What can I say, I just can’t resist eye candy. The lovely imagine on the cover is an illustration by Flora White for a 1914 edition of Peter Pan. I wasn’t familiar with this artist before, and I really love this image.

The one thing that kept me from really loving Feeling Like a Kid is the fact that it’s a short book, and is therefore not exactly very in-depth. Reading it I kept thinking, “yes, that’s a good observation” or, “yes, true enough”, but in the end I didn’t feel like I had been presented with any ideas I hadn’t thought of or come across before. To be fair, though, I’m someone who reads and thinks about children’s literature a lot, and who has read books on this topic before. If this were my first book on children’s literature, I’m sure I would have felt differently.

Still, I enjoyed it a lot, most of all because of the deep respect the author clearly has for children and the way they experience the world: he takes them seriously, and he’s not for a moment patronizing or dismissive.

I leave you with two more passages:

The small worlds of Children’s Literature, in other words, presents alternatives to consensual notions of dimension and, consequently, adult notions of importance. That is no small thing. Indeed, encountering a Miniland in children’s literature, we might repeat Jan Morris’s admiring comment about the country of Wales: “Its smallness is not petty; on the contrary, it is profound.”

“Too scary for children” was, in fact, the criticism made by some experts on child raising when Sendak’ Where the Wild Things Are was published in 1963. Later, when the book won the prestigious Caldecott Medal, Sendak directly faced his critics in his acceptance speech. First of all, he challenged their sentimental notion of childhood as a trouble-free time: “What is too often overlooked is the fact that from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, that fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, that they continually cope with frustration as best they can.” Then, mounting the argument for mastery and justifying his own book in terms of facing and conquering fears, Sendak observed: “It is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis. It is the best means they have for taming the Wild Things.”

Yes! Sendak is so right. I really hope the upcoming movie is scary.

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