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[goldvermilion87]

"Anything can be addressed to a child audience -- you just have to write it better"
--Steven Moffat

Comments

[alltoseek.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I think he's right; as long as by 'better' you read 'carefully and thoughtfully'. You have to know exactly what you are trying to say and how you are going to go about saying it.

By age 3 and 5 my kids had already experienced a lot of horrific real life events. There's no concept in fiction that's going to traumatise them further, although depending on how it's presented it could either make things worse or help them deal with it.

I am always on the lookout for children's books that present challenging/difficult topics with sensitivity and humanity. Unfortunately what you mostly get is a lot of "Let's solve this problem by beating up the bad guys!" or "Let's pretend that emotions don't exist/that good people only have 'good' emotions and always know exactly the right thing to do!"

For an adult audience you can present things in any old way you want and you'll find someone who'll like it. For mass appeal you just throw in a lot of sex and violence, half-naked women, car chases and explosions; for a more intellectual audience you can be obscure and philosophical. Or you can mix and match and confuse everyone and get them talking.

People are more protective of their children - everything made for children has to be first approved by the parents. So you have to write for both the parent and the child.

And children view things through a different lens. It can be very surprising to learn what they take away from different works. One part is their very literal and concrete approach to the world and another is their view is entirely through their own experience. They haven't yet been socialised into having a 'general' view through which to understand the world and how most people experience it, and have much more difficulty understanding how something might be different for a someone else.

For example I reviewed a reading passage my 8 year old had read and answered questions on. It was about a boy who was swinging on the swings and trying to jump farther and farther off while his mother watched. All the questions my son got 'wrong' were him putting himself and me in the places of the boy and mother, and how he and I would act/feel under that situation, instead of being able to fully immerse himself in the other boy's experience.