And beauty matters. In every culture across the world, throughout human history, we have decorated our belongings and environments and found pleasure in beauty. Though beauty may come in different forms, it is something for which humans feel a profound longing. Scientists have recently argued that this longing extends beyond humans into animal species such as birds and even into larger ecological systems. Telling children cynical or incoherent stories, and accompanying those stories with ugly pictures, amounts to training them to disregard their instinctive longing for beauty, and to sneer at or objectify the world instead.
You do not have to read Sidney, Pythagoras or Aristotle to feel instinctively that showing children beautiful pictures is better than showing them ugly ones. To any parent of a preschooler who cares about this, there are plenty of heartening classics, both vintage and modern.
Peepo! is the kind of beautiful classic kids should be read
Sybille von Olfers’ 1906 Root Children offers minutely observed drawings of the natural world, not to mention an exquisite age-appropriate introduction to the Art Deco style. The intricate worlds drawn by Janet and Allen Ahlberg repay close study even by an adult, whether in the playful Each Peach Pear Plum or the beautiful and nostalgic Peepo!
Anna Currey is a contemporary children’s author who gets it right
More recently, anything illustrated by Anna Currey’s delicate pen-and-ink and watercolour work (we have and love One Ted Falls Out Of Bed and Rosie’s Hat) will survive repeated readings without losing their warmth and sense of detail.
Why can’t all children’s books look like The Storm Whale?
Another favourite contemporary writer and illustrator in our house is the wonderful Benji Davies, whose modern classic The Storm Whale is both emotionally subtle and beautifully imagined, with something new to discover on every read.
The work of Benji Davies is also genuinely beautiful
Nor do nonfiction titles need to be free from wonder or beauty. Ella Bailey’s One Day On Our Blue Planet series adopts a clean-lined graphic style that is contemporary, spare and still full of life. She guides readers through different habitats — the Antarctic, the South American jungle and the African savannah — giving a glimpse of the wildlife there with just enough narrative to delight parents as well as children. (After two months of requesting the South American one at bedtime every night, my three-year-old can now name some ten species of rainforest monkey.)
It should be clear by now that I do not understand beauty to mean a single style or some dreary notion of realism. Beauty comes in many forms. With regard to children’s books, it is less about the style than a sense that the artist has taken care to represent their subject faithfully and with affection.
This is profoundly important. The default setting of small children is imaginatively ‘being’ something other than themselves: a cat, a fairy, the latest Disney princess. It is a process of exploring and gaining understanding both of self and of environment and is critical to normal social and emotional development. Stories and pictures whose illustrations encourage imaginative empathy and respect for their subject matter will encourage this developmental stage.
Caricatures, on the other hand, by distorting their subject matter in a way that diminishes its dignity, beauty or appeal, have the opposite effect. One cannot easily be ironic and imaginative at the same time, except perhaps in the form of satire.
My daughter often adopts a persona from a story or TV show she has seen, and can ‘be’ that persona for days at a time. But I have never seen her ‘be’ a character who was presented as caricature. Why would anyone wish to inhabit imaginatively a persona who was presented with a sneer?
A young child whose ordinary imaginative play was satirical in character would come across as disturbed to say the least. And how is a child accustomed to caricatures of the world supposed to develop into an adult filled with empathy for others and a love of beautiful surroundings?
Is this ugliness really what we want for the next generation?
Ugly stories with ugly pictures communicate materiality without wonder, conflict without resolution, sneering without kindness, and nonsense without clarification. Such stories train a child to accept those values in his or her adult life, without hope for anything better. Is that really what we want for the next generation?
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SubscribeMary Harrington nails it. This article is a keeper – pass it on. If you have young minds among you this holiday season, give some thought to the ideas and stories that were presented before you as a child. Real quality speaks to you.