Literature has an enormous impact on a child’s development during the early years of his or her life. It is important for parents and teachers to instill a love of reading in children while they are still young and impressionable. They are very naive and trusting because they are just beginning to develop their own thoughts, so they will believe anything they read (Lesnik, 1998). This is why it is so important to give them literature that will have a positive impact. Literature can make children more loving, intelligent and open minded because reading books gives them a much wider perspective on the world. Through reading, children’s behavior can be changed, modified or extended, which is why books are so influential in children’s lives while they are young (Hunt, 1998). Literature has the power to affect many aspects of a child’s life and shapes their future adult life. One positive element of reading is that it gives children the opportunity to develop their thoughts on books, which strengthens their cognitive development and encourages deeper thoughts. …show more content…
The literature that children read has the power to promote positive emotional behavior and moral development. Children’s literature “contains numerous moments of crisis, when characters make moral decisions and contemplate the reasons for their decisions,” which is an important skill that children need to develop. (Norton, p. 34. 2010). One book that helps children emotionally is called Scar by C. Moundlic. This story is about a boy who loses his mother at an early edge and has to learn how to cope with the grief. This book requires a lot of emotional intelligence and it helps children understand what death is (Kiefer, 2001). Reading books the deal with emotions, give children the knowledge to talk about their feelings instead of keeping them bottled
I began to read not out of entertainment but out of curiosity, for in each new book I discovered an element of real life. It is possible that I will learn more about society through literature than I ever will through personal experience. Having lived a safe, relatively sheltered life for only seventeen years, I don’t have much to offer in regards to worldly wisdom. Reading has opened doors to situations I will never encounter myself, giving me a better understanding of others and their situations. Through books, I’ve escaped from slavery, been tried for murder, and lived through the Cambodian genocide. I’ve been an immigrant, permanently disabled, and faced World War II death camps. Without books, I would be a significantly more close-minded person. My perception of the world has been more significantly impacted by the experiences I've gained through literature than those I've gained
"Reading." The Gale Encyclopedia of Childhood and Adolescence. Ed. Jerome Kagan and Susan B. Gall. Online Edition. Detroit: Gale, 2007.
“Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of the will, quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life” (Samuel Ullman). As teens go along in life, they learn through the things they read, hear, and see; in particular, when one reads a book, they can connect with the connotations and it can alter someone or influence. Being able to connect to something that another is feeling can really draw people in like bugs to a light. As more and more people can connect to books it becomes more popular so that they may feel a sense of security. Anthem by Ayn Rand and The Giver by Lois Lowry are two very great examples
Norton, D. E., & Norton. S. (2011). Through The Eyes Of a Child. An Introduction To Children’s Literature. Boston, MA, 02116: Eight-Edition Pearson Education
My dad taught me that books could be my teachers, my mom taught me that our backyard could be my classroom, and my sister showed me that you could bring books into the swimming pool. I did not know it when I would spend hours in the pool reading a book that my parents weren’t encouraging it in vain, but my family life, for good reason, was centered on books. We were the planets orbiting around one sun that was the bookshelf. Little did I know that books would be the catalyst to academic success in my early life, and I owe it all to my family. Although a life with a book in your nose might seem boring, I was never bored. Living through the characters vicariously, I explored Narnia with Lucy, attended Hogwarts with Harry, and rode dragons with Eragon. Of course
Children’s literature is supposed to help a child grow socially; classic children’s literature skews this social development into something inappropriate and unnecessary for today’s society by exhibiting poor morals and rewarding bad behavior.
...d allows future generations to go on clinging to the same stilted social values we fault now. Each author presents to us an image of the world and then displays the principles they hold dear by controlling their characters within it. It is by analyzing these images and principles that we will be fully able to understand the views present around us and thereby form a more educated one of our own. Ernst wrote, “…changes in children’s books often come long after they have been seen in reality” (76). We as teachers have a responsibility to dialogue these notions with our students so that they will have the insight to write about it in the future.
For children’s literature the Golden Age was a time of reform and new beginnings. The Golden Age opened the doors for an interesting read where adults are not present. The literature that was intended for children during this period introduced a world of literature in which children were the protagonist. These stories not only take children on remarkable journeys though time but they also address many issues of social class in regards to children. The Golden Age reflects greatly the Victorian era where children were left to become orphans because their parents could not support them financially or because their parents just did not want them. The Golden age welcomed children into a society that they were once neglected by. It was not until religion rebuked the evil out of children that they became acceptable by society and as a result were allowed to be portrayed in books.
Throughout our childhood, and children’s childhood we read books. I remember reading, and having so many favorite books. The books that I loved, I now read to my son, and I am sure he will read to his children as well. Books are used throughout different milestones in a child’s life, as the child grows; the books change to meet their developmental needs. Theorists such as Piaget, Vygotsky, and Kohlberg have many theories regarding each developmental stage, and the needs in each stage from infancy, to adulthood. I am going to discuss how books can relate to these theories.
There are select novels which seem to find their way into children’s hands regardless of whether we gift them or not. Perhaps the instructor at school requests that each student read books over the summer and may include a number of well-known books on that list. As adults, we have a responsibility to encourage reading for our own children, for our nieces and
Finally, parents are encouraged to read with their children at home which not only promotes literacy development with the children getting the adequate encouragement and support they need to read and learn from their parents, but also help in the children’s social and emotional development and achieve “more resilience to stress, greater life satisfaction, greater self-direction and self-control, greater social adjustment, greater mental health, more supportive relationships, greater social competence, more positive peer relations, more tolerance, more successful marriages, and fewer delinquent behaviors” (Desforges and Abouchaar, 2003).
Literature has been part of society since pen met paper. It has recorded history, retold fables, and entertained adults for centuries. Literature intended for children, however, is a recent development. Though children’s literature is young, the texts can be separated into two categories by age. The exact splitting point is debatable, but as technology revolutionized in the mid-twentieth century is the dividing point between classic and contemporary. Today’s children’s literature is extraordinarily different from the classics that it evolved from, but yet as classic was transformed into modern, the literature kept many common features.
Reading to children can teach them skills they’ll need throughout their entire life. Reading aloud not only enhances their skills, it also affects how the their school life is. Being read to regularly is important to maintain the skills that the child learns, the earlier a child is being read to, the more skills they acquire. Parents will benefit from reading also, it creates a bond with their child that last a lifetime. Reading aloud will introduce children to books and reading so they can eventually do it on their own. Reading to children can improve many aspects of their life.
Children’s literature is, as Peter Hunt argued, a ‘remarkable area of writing: it is one of the roots of western culture, it is enjoyed passionately by adults as well as children, and it has exercised huge talents over hundreds of years’. Children’s literature is good quality books for children from birth to adolescence, coating topics about importance and interests to children of those ages, through prose and poetry, fiction and non-fiction. Children’s literature is probably the most exciting and vibrant of all literary studies, and its wide range of texts, from novels to picture books, and from oral forms to multimedia and the internet, presents a huge challenge. The important theme in children’s literature is the tension between the popular and the prestigious, or in other
Both books are good for parents and children to share a new adventure in life changing experiences, whether the baby is not the baby anymore, but a big brother or sister or if the young child is not happy about who they are until they see that who they want to be is not what they expect. Literature can provide young children adventures they may never experience in their life time. For those young children, who do experience adventures in their life, they need good age appropriate literature in their lives to show them different ways on how to deal, cope, or function in their life. A child’s personality can be supported and nurtured if they are given opportunities to explore and learn from their environment, whether the learning is exploring or reading a good book.