International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature

I agree that children need to be—and usually want very much to be—taught right

from wrong. But I believe that realistic fiction for children is one of the very hardest

media in which to do it... You get ‘problem books’. The problem of drugs, of divorce,

of race prejudice...and so on—as if evil were a problem, something that can be

solved, that has an answer, like a problem in fifth grade arithmetic. If you want the

answer, you just look at the back of the book.

That is escapism, that posing evil as a ‘problem’...

But what, then, is the naturalistic writer for children to do? Can he present the

child with evil as an insoluble problem... To give the child a picture of ...gas

chambers...or famines or the cruelties of a psychotic patient, and say, ‘Well, baby,

this is how it is, what are you going to make of it’—that is surely unethical. If you

suggest that there is a ‘solution’ to these monstrous facts, you are lying to the child.

If you insist that there isn’t, you are overwhelming him with a load he’s not strong

enough yet to carry...

‘The child and the shadow’, in Haviland 1980:112–113

Not only that, but ‘realism’ as a genre has become a site for fashionable angst. John
Rowe Townsend noted in ‘An elusive border’:

I remember thinking how refreshing it would be to read a book about young people

who enjoyed life, did well at school, had happy relations with their parents, and

neither became nor made anybody pregnant. But fictionally, I suppose, that would

be a dull life.

Heins 1977:49

It would also be tactically difficult. Gillian Rubenstein:

It’s partly a children’s book convention that you write from the kids’ point of view,

so you cannot be entirely fair to the parents as well. If you are going to write about

children of twelve and thirteen who have totally understanding and marvellous

parents, there’ll be nothing to write about.

Nieuwenhuizen 1991:243

But parents, and other adults, are very sensitive, and this brings us to that constant
problem of children’s literature, censorship. A rationalist approach has been voiced by
Joan Aiken in ‘Between family and fantasy’: ‘Exercising any degree of control over the
kind of books written for or read by children is a highly doubtful policy ... What terrifies
one child may seem merely comic to another, or may be completely ignored; one can’t
legislate for fear’ (Haviland 1980:63). This is all very well in theory, but writers who push
at the edges of acceptability are confronted with practical censorship. Judy Blume:

Adults have always been suspicious of books that kids like. It seems as if some adults

choose to forget what mattered to them when they were children ... Many adults do

not trust children.

West 1988:11

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