Honey for a Child's Heart

While I was reading Graham’s insightful blog on Tumblon about helping children understand another person’s point of view, I immediately thought of the role of literature in teaching readers how the world looks to others—not just with facts, but with the heart.

Good stories are good teachers. How do you best learn, for example, what is means to be unselfish or kind or gentle? Those are abstract words. But if I see those words demonstrated by the actions of characters in a story, then I begin to understand. When someone mis-treats my favorite character in the story, I know this is not right. I sense the unfairness of this. It dawns on me that this is what it looks like to be selfish—and it is ugly.

The remarks of a small girl in a letter she wrote to Laura Ingalls Wilder illustrate the point. She wrote, “O Laura, if I was you I would have kicked Nellie Oleson in the leg when she was mean to you!” She saw what meanness looked like in a story. Of course, if Laura Ingalls Wilder were still alive she might have written back to her to point out that kicking Nellie was not the way to solve the problem. But at least this child recognized injustice when she saw it. Meanness is ugly.

Stories are about someone else. They are “out there” and I am only the observer. There is no need to defend myself as I might if I were accused of being selfish. I see it for what it is.

How else will a child learn what it means to be noble or brave or courteous? These are words hard to define. That’s why young boys feel braver when they read Call it Courage (Armstrong Sperry). They see what it looks like. Older children who read Tolkien’s Trilogy say that reading these books has taught them what it means to be noble or valiant.

I’d like every family to read aloud Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (at the appropriate age—it’s in the 8th grade reading curriculum, but a younger child can understand it if read aloud) to begin to understand what injustice comes with prejudice - and older children to read its prequel, The Land. It helps you understand how others feel.

Reading The Hundred Dresses touched my niece’s heart. She had no previous understanding of why a little girl might wear a worn-out dress with many patches on it. I could go on and on—stories of handicapped children, stories of bullies picking on vulnerable others, stories that give insight into why some people are cruel. It’s the working out of the good-versus-evil plotting that is part of good stories—and which is the story of the universe. Stories help us see the importance of choices in the way we act.