Portrayal of Trust Between Adult And Children in Children Literature

One among many important life skills aspects is trust. Human needs to develop good trust in order to be able to have healthy relationship with others and thrive.With trust, people can form meaningful relationship hence this important life skill should be best taught since early childhood. Trust according to Merriam Webster dictionary is assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone or something. Ericson in the book Childhood and Society states the notion that trust is a basic property of a person that builds up in early childhood. The importance of having trust is emphasized that without trust, a person may find it difficult to establish close relationship (Kostromina, et al.1). As result, parents must help children nurturing and planting the idea of trust. Since they are the person who are in contact with children at early childhood in which according to Education Encyclopedia (qtd in healthy people 2020 ) is a time of tremendous physical, cognitive and socio-emotional and language development stage. Simultaneously, at this age children not only learn from their parents but also the literature they read. The person who determines the material for children are often the adults. They have control over what children can and can’t read. Hence, it is important for parents to know the difference between adult and children literature. Both literature may not have striking differences however according to Elaine from ZunTold, there are some materials that are not suitable for children.In another words, children should not be exposed to materials that are not suitable for their age. Elaine adds even some materials are not suitable for children, there are children who lives through difficult experience and it is important to see how it is reflected in the story. As much as children needs trust, it appears that many children literature does not portray a good trust relationship between adult and children.

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The stories with narrative promoting low trust should not be exposed to children. As previously mentioned, children is at the stage of learning and reading a piece that promotes low trust can unconsciously shape their young mind. There are many real life cases where children do not trust their parents to tell about things that happened to them. From a research conducted on trust by (Rottenberg,et al. 1), it mentioned that low trust promotes loneliness especially to girls. I choose trust because I think many children stories by adult are not reflecting and promotion the idea of trust between adult and children. The samples of the book that I use to examine for this essays are Coraline by Neil Gaiman, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Charlie and The Chocolate Factory by Ronald Dahl, James and The Giant Peach by Ronald Dahl, and Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson. From these works, I will examine how trust is being depicted by the respectable authors. Some of the works are classics with exception of Coraline by Neil Gaiman being the modern children literature. The choosing of different era of this children literature hopefully enrich the discussion as to how trust portrayed from time to time. I also attempt to find changes on how trust between children and adult portrayed. The limitation of this essay is that it is assumed that children at early to middle childhood read those books.

According to Delahoyde, literary texts express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of author own’s neuroses. Furthermore, he states that usually it is assumed all characters are projection of the author’s psyche. This notion is called psychoanalytic criticism. This criticism will be used to see how trust portrayed in children’s literature from the book samples above.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman is a fantasy children story about a young girl who got into a realm where she meets alternative horror version of her parents. She first liked her alternative version of her parents despite they do not look like her parents. In that realm, the other mother told her that her “real” parents are grateful that they can leave Coraline alone. “How nice it is not to have Coraline anymore,” said her mother with a happy smile. “ Now we can do all the things we always wanted to do, like go abroad, but were prevented from doing by having a little daughter”(19). furthermore, “ she hoped that what she had just seen was not real there was a tiny doubt inside of her” (19). She saw this through a mirror where actually her parents were trapped by the other mother. Prior this event, she realized her parents were inside a mirror and reported it to the police yet the police thinks she was joking. “ You’re up a bit after your bedroom time, aren’t you young lady?” “ I am ringing to report a crime” “ I think my other mother has them both in her clutches. She may want to keep them and their eyes with black buttons” “ you ask your mother to make you a big old mug the you a hug..” he has a deep reassuring voice(16). From this conversation, the author portrays that the adult, in this case the policeman does not trust what Coraline has to say. Children have their own way to express things but that does not mean they can not be trusted, in which we found through this story, that the parents was kidnapped by the other mother.

The second book titled Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery portrays trust in a different way. The protagonist in the story is a little boy who drew a picture then asked adult opinions on said picture. They did not believe that it was a boa eating elephant. “ I showed my masterpiece to the grown-ups, and asked them whether the drawing frightened them. But they answered: “Frighten? Why should any one be frightened by a hat?” My drawing was not a picture of a hat. It was a picture of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant. But since the grownups were not able to understand it, I made another drawing: I drew the inside of the boa constrictor, so that the grown-ups could see it clearly. They always need to have things explained(2)”. Later, the adults told the boy to pursue something else.In the end, he didn’t pursue drawing. In this story, adult portrayed that they do not trust the children ability or their idea about things around them.

In the third book by Ronald Dahl titled Charlie and Chocolate factory it blatantly express the notion that adult can not be trusted. This can be found from the end of the story where Mr Wonka expresses his reason to pick a child as the heir of his factory. Mind you, there are thousands of clever men who would give anything for the chance to come in and take over from me, but I don’t want that sort of person. I don’t want a grown-up person at all. A grown-up won’t listen to me; he won’t learn. He will try to do things his own way and not mine. So I have to have a child. I want a good sensible loving child, one to whom I can tell all my most precious sweet-making secrets – while I am still alive’(30). In this story he mentions that adult won’t listen which furthers imply that is the behavior of adult, who won’t listen to anyone even children. It is similar with the other two story above that imply adult don’t listen to children.

The fourth book by Katherine Paterson, the trust between adult and children manifest similarly by the adult inability to listen to the children. One of the protagonist in the story, Leslie Burke recounts the tale that her parents move to suburban despite she was disagreeing with the idea. Similarly in this story, the adult do not have the capability to listen and trust children’s opinion.

From three of four narratives above, adult tends to be portrayed as missing from the picture. That is not the way to build trust as from many accounts on building trust between children and adult mention that spending time with children helps with building and strengthening trust. It remains intriguing that the authors of these works are adult who projects trust issues into characters and narrative they build. There is not much difference between the modern versus the classic stories as trust between adult and children still portrayed in a negative light. Given the importance of developing trust between children and adult during childhood, writers of children story must re-think on how they are portraying trust relationship between adult and children.

Bibliography

1. Adult VS Children's Fiction, 13 Mar. 2018, https://www.zuntold.com/magazinePiece/15.
2. Dahl, Roald, and Quentin Blake. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Knopf, 2004.
3. Early and Middle Childhood | Healthy People 2020. https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/early-and-middle-childhood/objectives.
4. Erikson, Erik H. Childhood and Society. Vintage Digital, 2014.
5. Gaiman, Neil, and Dave McKean. Coraline. HarperTrophy, an Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2003.
6. Kostromina, Svetlana N., et al. “Trust in and Perception of Parents in Children with Different Coping Strategies.” Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, vol. 233, 2016, pp. 35–41., doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.10.123.
7. Paterson, Katherine. Bridge to Terabithia. Harper Trophy, 2003.
8. Psychoanalytic Criticism, https://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/psycho.crit.html.
9. Rotenberg, Ken J., et al. “The Relationship Between Loneliness and Interpersonal Trust During Middle Childhood.” The Journal of Genetic Psychology, vol. 165, no. 3, 2004, pp. 233–249., doi:10.3200/gntp.165.3.233-249.
10. Saint-Exupery Antoine de, and Katherine Woods.The Little Prince. Ancient Wisdon Publications, 2018.
11. “Trust.” Merriam-Webster, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trust.