6. The power of literature in the child's emotional development
The concept of child and children's literature
The concern on the effects that traditional stories can have is present in the mind of many parents and also of educators from very distant times. The convenience of offering the children the opportunity to listen or to read this type of stories frequently appears in professional encounters among teachers discussing topics related with the encouragement to read. Their doubts rotate around the possible dangers that contain the stories of aggressive content and the negative effect that it can generate in the mind of the children of such young ages. These questions sometimes come from educators and other times from the parents who share their concerns with us on the use of these literary texts in the classroom. It is an ideological discussion expressed in the different conceptions of what is a child, what does childhood mean and that universe where their life is developed that we call "infantile."
Childhood has not always existed as a topic with its own entity. If we look back some centuries, we can verify that only from the beginning of the 18 th century the topic of the childhood began to be considered as such. Previously, no writing was done for children, the stories that we now consider traditional were written for the adults, without any intention that they reached the infantile population. But the children appropriated spontaneously of the stories, because thanks to the adult practice of oral transmission, they ended up being part of their culture.
The interest for this stage of the man's vital cycle became embodied later in historical terms, and it developed in different fields, especially in psychology and pedagogy, through the investigations of the characteristics of evolutionary development and the conditions for learning, in such a way that they shaped a "culture of the infantile" in which was part the toy industry, especially those that we know today as didactic toys. But that culture was governed by very specific approaches as to what it meant to be "a child". Childhood was conceived as a stage in which purity, innocence, kindness, the absence of aggressive feelings and sexuality, were essential characteristics that pedagogy had the duty of preserving and cultivating.
The stories that began to gain an important presence in the classroom, had to show the child a tailor made reality. Authors and educators were in perfect agreement as to the function to be played by children's literature, and they were devoted to write, and to disseminate, stories that they introduced to this ideal child acting in daily situations; stories without conflicts and contradictions, with a flat, harmonious reality, where supposedly the child could see himself reflected and confirmed.
The child of the stories was a being without conflicts, without anguishes, imbalances, without "unhealthy" restlessness or internal uneasiness that lived in a reality "of story", but of this type of stories, where the free fantasy was eradicated in favor of a design reality. Everything worked well between the child's internal reality and the external reality, and the stories had to show this harmony and fulfill the function of educating without allowing that the mind and the soul of the child got lost among the paths of fantasy. The topic of sexuality should be dealt with, but in a "realist", reasonable way; the reproductive process was taught by talking about the sexual activity in the nature, with examples of fecundations among plants, so that the child learned about the mechanism of reproduction in an unaffected manner, without sex, without fantasy, and without emotion. This way, all the dangerous connections with the dark and unknown side of the human condition were avoided.
This was the situation in the fifties, but still in our days those ideas are present in some sectors of our society, because the transformations in thoughts and beliefs operate very slowly, because we are heirs of the culture that has constituted us as people. Dewey said on this that the changes… "are not noticeable but only after several years have gone by. For this, it is required that a new generation comes about with mental habits that have been formed in other circumstances". This is not to place us in the arrogant position of one who has discovered the truth that clears all the contradictions of the past, but of assuming a critical and reflexive attitude that allows us to continue advancing, because there isn't, either, in any event, an absolute truth or a last word.
The 20th century has opened the doors to a set of knowledge in the field of the Psycho genetics and Psychology, with Piaget, Wallon and Freud that have changed substantially the way to conceive the human being and the early stages of his development. Genetic epistemology and psychoanalysis highlight the importance of the symbolic function for the knowledge and establishment of the relationships with the physical and human means. These authors affirm that the reality is symbolic, it is a construction interwoven with elements of the fantasy of the subject that perceives the real thing and transforms it to the measure of his needs and possibilities. Example of this is the symbolic play, through which the child "becomes..." or "he does that...”, making use of the elements of reality to transform them and to incorporate them as more and more complex structures of knowledge. Therefore, the symbol represents the free dimension of the relationship between the child and reality, that grants him a condition of singularity and special complexity.
Freud speaks about a psychic reality formed by structures that are formed in the exchange between the subject and the means, composed by thoughts and ambivalent feelings that configure the nascent psyche. It is a process of conflicting and painful development, where anxiety and insecurity appear as the main characteristics; also of an infantile sexuality that until that moment nobody had dared to outline, and that represents an essentially problematic and agitating aspect in the child's development. The theoretical discoveries and the clinical practice defined a childhood that had nothing to do with the golden childhood of other times. Reality is not separated from fantasy, and the relationship with the real thing is not harmonious, nor the child is that ideal child whose interior is pure harmony and kindness, and his development is not a linear and calm process of continuous evolution.
However, the moralist and realist stories continue having validity that in some cases substitutes the use of fairy tales as a way to fend off the dangers contained in the vocation of liberating the children from the devastating and harmful effects of fantasy.
What is the contribution of fairy tales to child development?
There are things that take us beyond the world of words; it is as the mirror of the fairy tales: one sees oneself in it and what one sees is not oneself. For an instant we glimpse at the inaccessible things, claimed by our soul."
Alexander Solzhenitsin
Not everything was forbidden regarding fantastic literature, a solution was thought of to satisfy at the same time the children who they loved to hear these stories, and not harm their minds and souls. With this purpose transformations were made in the texts eliminating the aggressive, sexual and violent scenes that gave the stories a moral and instructive side, a kind of mutilation of the word that, far from conserving the intrinsic value of the stories, it destroyed it, making them mediocre from the ethical and aesthetic point of view.
The educators know the quantity of different versions of the stories oral tradition of the Grimm brothers and of Charles Perrault, robbed in their adaptations of the cruelties "not apt for young children" that circulate in the homes and in our classrooms. The parents many times do not even notice that when they buy a book of traditional stories, what they are offering to their children is an adaptation and not the original, because they don't have the necessary information to be able to discern that exactly in these ages, it is important that the child reads or, if he is smaller he hears, the original version of the story, because only in that way will he be able to use it to elaborate imaginatively and without blames, most of the conflicts and restlessness that produce uneasiness in him. It is clear that some stories can be adapted in a linguistic sense, that is to say, modified in their syntax or vocabulary with the purpose of making them accessible to the child's understanding, but we should be careful that these adaptations do not have a character of moral or ethics censorship that robs the story of its true meaning.
In Bruno Bettelheim's well known work, "Psychoanalysis of fairy tales", he thoroughly explains which is the sense and function that these stories contribute to the infantile development. The author comments: " If he only has his resources, a child won't be able to imagine more than elaborations of the place where he really is, since he doesn't know the direction where he needs to go or how to arrive there. This is, by the way, one of the main contributions of fairy tales: they begin exactly where the child is from the emotional point of view, showing him the route to go on and telling him how to do it. That is achieved by means of a fantastic material that the child can imagine it best suits him, and of a series of images so that the child can easily understand all that he needs... If he is denied the access to the stories that communicate him implicitly that others also have the same fantasies, the boy ends up having the sensation that is the only one that imagines such things. A consequence of this is that the young child fears his own fantasies. On the other hand, the knowledge that others share his thoughts makes him feel that he is part of mankind part and it removes the fear that the destructive ideas make him different from the other ones". (B. Bettelheim, "Psychoanalysis of the stories of fairies". Ed. Critic 2004. p.130-131.
Another very interesting concept revealed by the analysis of Bettelheim, is related with the nature of the infantile thought, as long as it is always linked with fantasy, not as the normal adult that has been able to separate fantasy from reality in his thoughts. The pretense of the adults of making a child rationally understand the sense of his actions or the consequence of his acts through mature thinking, can only confuse and oppress him. The rational thought, for which the moralist and realist pedagogy plead cannot end up being ever the main instrument to express his feelings and to understand the world in which he lives. The fairy tales, on the other hand, offer the boy the possibility to solve many of the difficulties that are present in his inner world and the reality that he finds adverse. For example, Freud speaks to us of one of the anguishes, maybe the strongest that the human being experiences: the abandonment that is more intense the younger we are. Therefore, the relief that can be provided to a child by giving him the certainty that he will never be abandoned is enormous. As we know, many fairy tales end with the famous sentence “And they lived happily ever after". Bettelheim points out, that this sentence contains the certainty that the child yearns to feel that the characters meet again, after having sorted through a number of difficulties and they live a happy life together, that lasts forever. They also transmit to the children that life is full of difficulties and that to fight against them is unavoidable at the same time that positive, and that success depends in great measure of the effort and the zeal that we put into solving them. Sometimes, the stories transmit very sad feelings, however they rouse the children, not only for the literary value that they have and that the children know how to savor with delight, but because, in spite of the problems that their characters have to face, their stories have a happy end.
"The three little pigs"
It would be difficult to find an Early Childhood Educator that has not seen the absorbed faces of his students while they listen to the story of "The three little pigs". Of all the traditional narrations that we use in the classroom, maybe this is one has the biggest acceptance in the heart of the young children who, after hearing it for the first time, ask to listen to it day after day, demanding of the narrator the same words, the same voice tone and the same emotion in the story.
Bruno Bettelheim in the book already mentioned, "Psychoanalysis of fairy tales", does an interesting analysis of this story, the simbology that the characters contain highlighting the actions that they carry out and the outcome, as metaphors of the process of growth and development of the personality. He says that the child, identifying with each one of the three pigs, learns, without being aware of it that people evolve, and that growth has big advantages, since the third of them that is represented graphically as the biggest and bigger, the one who finally conquers the enemy, combining the effort of work, intelligence and rational planning. For the child's understanding, the three animals symbolize, unconsciously, evolution and man's progress, from a state of immaturity, represented by the two first piglets, to the mature condition of the one who knows how to face the conflicts in an intelligent way and, mainly, has achieved the capacity to defer the immediate execution of his desires (in this case, to play and enjoy the moment without thinking of the consequences), for the execution of a goal that will provide him security, well-being and the satisfaction of having conquered the enemy.
As for the symbolization of the child's internal world, of the intra psychic instances, (It, Me and Superme) the wolf represents the antisocial forces (It) of people and of which we should learn how to defend ourselves with the strength of a balanced Me that acts based on the principle of reality, deferring the impulses and the tendency to satisfy them without any concern. The three piglets symbolize that evolution, desirable in the human being that allows him a transformation in which a part of the pleasure is repressed, and the satisfaction is achieved keeping in mind the demands that imposed by reality. We can see this in the behavior of the third pig who takes enough time to build a house of bricks, and gets up very early in the morning to avoid the wolf. This way he makes sure he can have a delicious meal, while the other two, in a different level, prefer to play and enjoy the immediate thing, building not very solid houses, without foreseeing the consequences of their behaviors.
In the words of Bettelheim: "The three pigs guide the child's thoughts on his own development without ever telling him what he should do, allowing the boy to reach his own conclusions. This method contributes to maturation, while if we explain to the child what he should do, the only thing that we would get would be to substitute the slavery of his immaturity for the slavery that implies to follow the orders of the adults."
Literature and affectivity in the child
The relationship of literature with the human being's general development constitutes a link to learning, socialization, verbal and cognitive development, and to the process of emotional development. All these aspects have great importance in the child's evolution, but we will highlight this last one, to consider that emotional education finds in literature a significant ally, since literary narration approaches the two levels of the psychic structure simultaneously: the intra subjective and the interpersonal.
Symbolization of intra psychic instances.
Good infantile narrations have a development in which there are always characters, barriers, obstacles, compensations and results, just as Propp analyzed in his study on Russian stories. Based on this narrative structure there are contradictions and conflicts that resonate in the boy's internal world, stimulating his fantasy and allowing him to put a face to what he feels internally as threatening. As we saw previously, in the story "The three little pigs", literary narrations promote the symbolization and the elaboration among the different instances of the psyche (It, Me and Superme) that are represented by the characters of the story, and they allow the child to find orientations and solutions to the problems presented to him in the development process.
Neutralization of fears and anxieties
The conflicts of the boy's affective development are manifested through sensations of fear, phobias, nightmares or apprehensions of any kind. Nightmares are often frequent and they show the inexpressible character of these conflicts. In this sense, infantile literature contains a symbolic arsenal that allows the child to sum up these fears through actions and precise characters, being able to elaborate his conflicts in the same way that he does when playing, symbolizing, with procedures and outcomes.
Formation of the family novel
"The family novel" it is the name given in psychoanalysis to the evolutionary narrative structure that the child builds imaginarily in the to organize the events of his personal history, allowing him to coin a sense of the past, of the future and of the present. This "narrative system" is essential to organize the ideals, values and feelings of identity, and literature, with its diverse proposals, offers him new alternatives that enrich the possibilities that the child has to build his own narration of life.
Apart from the intra psychic function that we have referred to above, infantile literature promotes possibilities of relation, since through its stories the boy is socialized and sees the life of the others as equivalent to his own. Infantile literature works with universal topics that transcend the immediate historical and cultural particularity and takes up ethical values that can be applied to almost all the societies. This is very important because it promotes the affective incorporation of the inknown facilitating an experience of cognitive and emotional order.
As a “transitional object" of culture
Literature can be a transitional object, of which Winnicott speaks, as in the case of the toy or the object to which the child is linked to be able to move toward the outside away from the maternal relationship. Literary narrations allow the boy to incorporate an entire world of representations, establishing a bridge between their internal world and the exterior, in the same way that he does with the object, with the difference that literature provides a bigger wealth and symbolic complexity.
On the other hand, the child lives the narration as a possession in the word and in his memory, that allows him to construct his own world, a personal universe that he retains in the words and that many times constitutes a bond, for that reason it is frequent that the children demand to hear the story in the same words and with the same tone as it was told the first time. Lastly, and very important, literature contributes an exercise of autonomy, maybe the first one, in the sense that it offers the child the possibility to build his own narration.
Contemporary literature for children
As all we know, there are good and bad books of stories, or rather, literature exists and "other things" that intend to be so, at the expense of good formats, attractive illustrations and seductive covers. The certain thing is that it is not easy to find a good book, and we have to dedicate a lot of time to the task of investigating and selecting the literary items for the classroom library or the Center, with copies that fulfill the function of developing the imagination, process emotional conflicts, and feed the reader's aesthetic sense.
The educators should give up the pretense that the books of stories for children necessarily transmit academic knowledge and ethical-moral norms that make sense fundamentally for the adult, as long as they feel the responsibility of bringing literature closer to young children so that "it serves" to certain objectives: to work general topics, or vocabulary, or the cycle of life, or the colors or the letters... in short, to subordinate art to pedagogy. Literature has a wealth that transcends those purposes, it possesses the magic to expand the emotional universe and provide an aesthetic enjoyment that feeds and enriches the spirit of the children in an unequal way.
In many occasions, the teachers that attend workshops of reading animation, comment that their approach to choosing the books of stories for the classroom is of academic character, that is to say, they select the stories for the relationship that they have with the topic that is being dealt with in the didactic unit. We don't say that that this should not be done, what we want to highlight is that the story time in early childhood education - and in all the stages of schooling - should be fundamentally a moment of pleasure. "To take the children seriously, - says Luis Daniel González* (Luis Daniel Gonzalez, “Treasures for the memory”, 2002, p.31 ),… like the best stories for them do, means not to see childhood as a period of time awaiting to get bigger, but as the years of formation of the character, that group of values that compose a whole personality and that prepare the child to face his own development..." On the other hand, a good story, from the narrative and literary point of view, always offers the possibility of working some important aspect that contributes to the child's development. A good story to be read the children, is not one that treats infantile topics in a childish way, but which refers to life, emotions, and sensations, with enough subtlety and sensibility to impact the child's affective listening. Lastly, and without aiming to make a rule of this, if a story leaves the adult indifferent, or it bores him, the most probable thing is that the same will happen to the children; consequently, when a story moves us and gives us a good time, in the wide sense of the term, there will be many possibilities that the children are also moved by it. To read and to reread the stories before sharing them with the children, to enjoy them, to be moved and to fall in love with them is a basic requirement so that we cannot only transmit the word, but their sense through the voice and the expression that is born of our own affective implication.
Previous selection should be an indispensable task every year, because only this way we will be able to have a well-known, previously revised and up-to-date material to work with when we consider it more opportune.
In this sense, the educator is also a mediator between the word and the child, both when he reads, as when he prepares him so that he is able to look for and find what he likes in an autonomous way. For that reason it is important that since they are very young they can be in contact with a variety of topics and styles that offer a wide vision of reality and provide elements for reflection.
