Sometimes you look at older children’s movies and you just have to wonder… why? What possessed
the people behind them to think that this was a good idea for kids? And I know this isn’t just
a me thing, because other people have been talking about it too. There’s a really great youtube video
by the TheOdd1sOut about how freaky the movie The Dark Crystal was to him as a kid, and over on the
channel In Praise of Shadows there’s a half-hour breakdown of the absolute fever dream that is
Return to Oz. On the one hand, these movies are just brimming over with nightmare fuel…
On the other… They’re classics. Iconic.
Important. Even though they’re scary.
Which is interesting, because…. aren’t… children’s stories… not supposed to be that way?
Isn’t children’s fiction supposed to be… you know… happy?
Well… not if kids have anything to say about it. Which I think they do.
Spoiler warning: a little later in the video I’m going to tell you something really interesting
about Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline, but I think it’ll mean a lot more if you’ve read the book
first. It is an amazing story, perhaps the best-loved piece of children’s horror ever
written. If you haven’t, definitely go listen to the audiobook before you watch the video.
You can get it for free, thanks to our sponsor, Audible.
Visit the link in the description or go to audible.com/talefoundry to get started!
Honestly, the entire concept of “children’s fiction” is strange to me, because it assumes that
the stories people are telling to children… are for children. But who decides what children want?
Is it really the children themselves? Is it really the kids who are deciding that
most of all they’re interested in the safest, happiest, most non-threatening, black-and-white,
simplified version of whatever they consume? …Or is that just what adults want for children?
This is actually a pretty old concept. We all know the trope—myths and fairytales are usually not
much like their Disney adaptations. Zeus is really a horndog, Snow White’s step-mother is a cannibal,
Prince Phillip did a whole lot more than kiss the Sleeping Beauty to wake her up.
In the process of making these stories palatable for children (by which I mean their parents),
these stories lose all manner of complex and questionable morality.
Because, originally, these stories were written by and for adults. It was only as they entered a
market perceived to be specifically for children that they started to lose these features.
And you know? A lot of fairytales can survive without their darkest corners.
Cinderella is mostly the same story whether or not the step-sisters have their eyes pecked
out by crows or their feet cut into pieces. But that doesn’t work with every story. This kind of
omission becomes damaging when the darkness—that “adult content”—is woven into the story.
There are some abridgements, like The Moby Books Illustrated adaptation of The Count of
Monty Cristo, which have to lose up to half the contents of the book to make it child-safe, which
is a little ridiculous. It hamstrings the plot and makes the conclusion awkward and confusing.
This process is known by many as Bowdlerization, named after Thomas Bowdler’s abridgements of some
Shakespeare plays and… uh… the bible. It’s also often called Disneyfication for… obvious reasons.
But more than either of these, I like to use the term sterilization for this. Because really,
it’s the process of making the story so clean and harmless that no parent could possibly fear giving
it to their child… often losing a lot of its identity and much of its value in the process.
Sterilizing it. That’s the thing I’m most worried about, here.
And it’s interesting how this affects not only selections and revision,
but the writing, too. So much of the fiction created for children is devoid of darkness.
The conflicts are extremely shallow and banal, as if difficult things don’t happen to kids.
Yes, there are there are exceptions like Coraline and Return to Oz,
but for every one of those, there are five more Coco Melons or Dora the Explorers.
Where is the child in all of this? How do we actually think of that audience?
To be honest… I’m not sure that people often do. I think for many the concept of “childhood”
is actually a product of nostalgia. In an essay on writing for children, C.S. Lewis wrote that:
“Sentimentality is so apt to creep in if we write at length about children as seen by their elders.
And the reality of childhood, as we all experienced it, creeps out. For
we all remember that our childhood, as lived, was immeasurably different from what our elders saw.”
As people grow older, they lose perspective on what it is to be
a child. The feelings and memories can be and often are lost to the nostalgia.
On a biological and social level, childhood certainly exists. You can and should generally
be able to tell a child from an adult by sight alone. But can you really make that distinction
for your own experience so easily? Can you really track the differences in perception that make you
feel more like a child or an adult? Can you even remember enough of your perception to
tell how it’s changed? I think that part of development tends to be sort of invisible.
Neil Gaiman was once asked for advice by a teenage fan who wanted to write adult characters.
He told them to “Observe adults. Know that each and every one of them is faking it.
At no point was any adult actually given an instruction manual on how to do adulthood.
Inside each of them is someone exactly like you. Now you can write them.”
And I think the same is sort of true for children.
I think, through the lens of nostalgia, a sort of “archetypal child” emerges. The child
becomes separate and distinct from the adult, insular in its safety and comfort and bliss.
But if you could peel that back and remember the things that you saw as a child that you simply
didn’t understand at the time? The things that hurt and upset you that you didn’t have
language for? I think you would find that a lot of those things still work on you in a similar way.
You’ve just learned to cope. You’ve developed perspective. You know how to navigate them safely.
The world itself is not so much different; you’ve only learned to see it differently.
There are probably a lot of other reasons for this as well, marketing and such,
but I think this “othering” of children is by and large what guides the creation of much sterilized
children’s fiction. I think it leads authors toward an approach to writing for them that’s
actually… startlingly unempathetic. In writing for this idealized concept of a child,
authors perpetuate an image of the world that children do not actually see. And it
becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Childhood becomes a parody of itself, built out of a
fictionalized retrospective on it—what people would like it to be—rather than what it is:
a more confusing, more delicate part of the same life you’ve been living this whole time.
This concept of children doesn’t really tend to be much of an issue when it comes to the lighter
parts of the material. If a kid doesn’t get a joke because it’s too technical—well
okay, maybe it’s not as effective, not what I would call concerning necessarily.
But when it comes to challenges? The parts of the fiction that are difficult—that are perhaps
supposed to be difficult? That’s where I think this archetype can cause some serious problems.
Because I think some of the challenges people perceive are as illusory as the archetype itself.
The glaring issue here is what I would call “explicit” content. Sex, violence, drugs,
profanity—a whole assortment of things we think of by and large as potentially dangerous in media.
And we’re right to be concerned. It’s a divisive topic, but I’ve read studies which more or less
prove that frequent consumption of violent media can lead to more violent tendencies in children,
and I’d be shocked if the same weren’t true for other dangerous or risky behaviors as well.
The normalization of these things and the ability to exercise self-control or set boundaries in the
face of it is a challenge children probably aren’t equal to. That one’s real. Trying to
let them sort those things out too soon can lead to poor conclusions which could
potentially warp how they see the world. But does that mean we have to remove all
mention of those things from our fiction in order for children to consume it?
On the contrary, I think it’s also important that children are able to discover in some way
that these things do exist, and that they’re part of the world that they will experience.
As long as the media they consume isn’t normalizing or romanticizing it,
most of the “adult stuff” probably won’t actually register to a child at all.
Bambi wouldn’t be the same story if we were to omit the death of his mother altogether. Loss is
a part of life, and the darkness in that story is one of the things that makes it so powerful.
A child can perhaps process the concept of the permanent loss of a parent, but they’d
very likely lack the context to extrapolate what exactly happened to Bambi’s mother. They probably
wouldn’t experience this darkness and also imagine her bullet-riddled corpse. And we certainly don’t
need to show that part of it for the effect to work. That would most likely just shock them,
possibly leading to trauma, or, if they saw content like it often enough, desensitization.
There’s a line to walk here. We do want to prevent children from being harmed by their fiction,
but I think this archetypal child creates in adults a paranoia that any darkness is too much.
That exposing children to sadness, pain, suffering, fear, the existence of true
danger… will permanently harm them. And while that’s a concern for the perfect
beauty of childhood as a concept, I don’t think that’s a legitimate problem for actual children.
I think they can process more than we sometimes expect. Yes, they do lack experience—their minds
literally aren’t as developed—but that doesn’t mean they can’t find value. I wouldn’t expect
a child to pick up a book like Brave New World and appreciate the nuance of Huxley’s
social commentary, but I think their eyes would still sparkle at all the new words and ideas.
Children aren’t stupid, they just lack context.
And really? I think that’s one of the things they crave the most.
Neil Gaiman has actually shared how his book Coraline—probably the best-loved children’s horror
story of all time—became… a children’s book. As he wrote it, chapter by chapter, his agent would read
the story to her daughter. And since she was never scared and only wanted to know what happened next,
his agent decided that the book could, in fact, be published for children.
It wasn’t until many years later that the daughter, now a bit older and more experienced,
explained that she was actually terrified by the story… but she wasn’t going to let
on that she was scared, because then she wouldn’t have found out how it ended.
Just as a grown-ups love horror for how it probes the boundaries of their psyche, romance for how
it attacks their cynicism, tragedy for how it challenges their composure and security,
I think most children also love to be frightened, moved, questioned by the fiction they consume.
It’s hard for me to believe they want to be hemmed in, trapped in a sterile purgatory
of adult design. I think, if given the chance, most children would race toward that challenge,
scary, difficult subject matter and all. I think they long to test their boundaries and discover
the true shape of the world they live in! Isn’t this why you have to cover electrical outlets and
put special caps on pill bottles and detergents? Children don’t know the danger they face yet,
but boy are they ready to find out what it is. And despite the fact that it’s all made up,
that’s something fiction can give them. It can be a safe way to discover things that might otherwise
be too difficult for someone so new to life to approach. An opportunity for them to experience
new things without… experiencing them. Unlike real situations, which you cannot always escape from,
you can always put down the book, turn off the movie, stop playing the game. The child
has that power, which provides a great deal of safety all on its own.
By allowing children to explore in this way—allowing them to consume media that we
wouldn’t traditionally think of as for children, giving them material that does challenge them
in a safe way—grown-ups are also sending them a message: that it’s okay to discover these things.
That the world is not to be hidden from; it is to be found. And in sending that message, you’re also
letting children know that you’re on their side. You want what they want, and you’re there to help
them understand all the parts of it that confuse and upset them. Children don’t have all the tools
for the job, but if you lend them yours and give them a safe environment to learn in,
they can and will do it. No need to make them confront the things that could permanently warp
their perspective of reality, like graphic violence or the normalization of dangerous
and risky behaviors—but I think a bit of challenge can be of immeasurable value.
In the same essay I mentioned earlier, C.S. Lewis writes: “I think it is possible that by confining
your child to blameless stories of child life in which nothing at all alarming ever happens,
you would fail to banish the terrors, and would succeed in banishing all that can ennoble them
or make them endurable. (…) Since it is so likely that they will meet cruel enemies,
let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage.
Otherwise, you are making their destiny not brighter, but darker.”
This is how I think of fiction “for children.” Sterilizing everything they read is robbing them.
They don’t need an adult’s fantasy of childhood; they need the opportunity to grow. They should be
encouraged to confront challenges, and to discover that these difficult things are surmountable.
G.K. Chesterton is sometimes quoted as saying that “Fairy tales do not tell children that
dragons exist, but that dragons can be beaten,” and I think that’s true in more than one way.
When we write or choose fiction for children, it can be a wonderful thing to give them
optimistic tales of triumph, educating them on darkness and the way to overcome it.
But this is also something children will learn from experience, reading things that are not
necessarily made for them at all. Perhaps the story’s hero fails and the ending is tragic? The
child gets to return to their life, and whatever the book may have suggested, they find that after
tragedy, life goes on. Perhaps they encounter something more graphic than they had before?
Now they know the shape of it, which means they can discuss it, confront it, and de-fang it
before they run across it in the real world. I see this as a way to empower children. To teach them
what they are capable of. That not all dragons have scales, and not all heroes wield swords.
So, on the concept of children’s fiction? This monolithic thing with which we label aisles
of colorful books and soft, docile things designed for adults to buy for their kids?
I think it only sort of exists. Yes, bright colors and fun sounds,
simple stories that they can understand. I get it. Those things do probably hold some
inherent appeal for a simpler psyche. But also, meaningful challenges.
Things they won’t understand. Stories that are meant simply for people.
Because that’s what children are: little people who just… don’t know anything yet. Who want to.
As storytellers, I think that’s how we should try to treat them.
The best example I’ve ever seen is probably a book I mentioned a little earlier: Coraline. One of the
few bonafide pieces of children’s horror I’ve ever seen, it challenges kids in a variety of ways.
It plays with the ideas of identity and place, of familial bonds and their loss.
It puts kids eye to eye to real monsters. And honestly… it works even better on adults.
I definitely recommend giving it a read if you haven’t already. Actually, you have no excuse not
to, because Thanks to our Sponsor, Audible, you can get the audiobook of Coraline, read
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And this is where the robot stops telling you how to raise your kids.
I’ve got my hands full already anyway. This has given me quite
a bit to think about in terms of what stories I’m sharing with these ones…