Children’s stories should prepare children for reality

Authors of today’s children’s stories want to help little ones approach big questions. They have no apprehension about raising questions of existence, self-worth, and purpose in life. Although these are not light topics that can be addressed simply, they are often treated that way. Quick and thoughtless answers fit neatly in a picture book or an episode, but they do not prepare children to face the reality of the questions themselves.

Take, for example, a sequel about the fairy tale maiden, Rapunzel, in Disney Princess: 5 Minute Princess Stories (2019). Rapunzel is living with her parents after escaping from the tower. She finds it hard to adjust. She tries to sweep the castle floors and paint a mural, but is told that those are not princess jobs. She feels like a failure because she doesn’t have a job to give her purpose. Finally, she thinks to use her artistic skills to teach kids from town how to paint and invites them to the castle for a class. When a boy’s painting of a bird turns into an amorphous blob, he is downcast. Rapunzel comes to the rescue, telling him that his abstract brush strokes have “created a very special, one-of-a-kind bird!” Suddenly, rain falls on the paintings. Rapunzel recovers with an original idea: she dries the wet canvases and turns them into lanterns (in a nod to the lanterns released every year on her birthday in the original fairy tale). At the end of the story, Rapunzel tells her parents, “What I’ve thought are mistakes aren’t really mistakes; they are just me being me, learning and trying as I go along.”

The underlying moral of this story is that failure is an evil to be avoided and that to be happy, children should deny it. Rapunzel opposes failure. Learning and trying are expressions of herself, and they cannot be judged. But if these accidents are viewed as mistakes, there is no way to redeem them, no way to see oneself as successful or good. They are not expressions of self and must be cast away.

In real life, failure can be, and often is, necessary for success. That essential American story—a failed artist, business owner, writer, athlete, etc., tries and fails, but perseveres and finally succeeds—is part of our cultural canon.

But those success stories don’t dismiss failure; they embrace it as the crucible of personal growth.

Children’s author J. K. Rowling was a poor, single mother before she wrote the series that would make her a billionaire. She described her low point in a commencement address to Harvard University students in 2008:

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

Rowling saw her failure for what it was—and she was not broken by it. The Catholic spiritual author Fr. Jacques Phillipe writes that failure, if it’s going to be useful, must be accepted: “The secret actually is very simple. It is to understand that we can only transform reality fruitfully if we accept it first.”

When man rejects reality, his world becomes more convoluted and difficult. In “Find What Makes Your Family Special,” a story in the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood series, Daniel is confronted with a question. He knows that everyone is different, but he doesn’t know what separates his family from others. He doesn’t know what makes him special. He and his friends finally discover that the color of their fur is unique. O the Owl says his family is special because it is blue, and Miss Elena’s family has more than one color. In this neighborhood, difference is by definition special, no matter how trivial.

In Daniel’s neighborhood, every person must stand apart from others to be considered special, which is understood as significant, having a reason for being. The trouble is that, by definition, there can only be a few special people. Everyone cannot stand apart because there must be someone to stand apart from. Instead of acknowledging this fact, Daniel is compelled to justify his existence, his individual necessity. Daniel’s problem becomes his audience’s. What if they can’t think of something that makes them special? What if they choose something so insignificant, like Daniel, that it doesn’t hold up to real life?

There are children’s authors who anticipate this existential problem and attempt to give children another way to solve it.

Todd Parr’s Be Who You Are comes to mind. The book is not a story; rather, it just slings order after order at readers: “Just be who you are!”; “Be your own family”; “Love yourself.” It is clear that Parr wants children to receive love, but not the kind that can be lost or taken or unrequited. He wants them to possess the belonging found in a relationship, but without the relationship. Relationships are dangerous and unstable.

So he tells his reader to be the lover and the beloved, the Romeo and the Juliet, the father and the daughter. It doesn’t take much life experience to see how secure an idea this form of self-love appears to be, and also how confining and unsatisfying. But these books are for children, and they do not have life experience.

These stories are dangerous because they tell children that there is something wrong with them, that being is not enough; it must be justified. Then they propose ways to justify oneself, but these solutions are ultimately self-referential and therefore empty, lonely, and desperate. Even Parr, with his simple command, “Be Who You Are!” admits that being ourselves is something that must be achieved.

Contemporary children’s literature begets contemporary adult literature. Disappointed by stories that do not prepare us for reality, we resign ourselves to “real” stories. Adult fiction praises itself for being all grown up, for rejecting happy endings because they are not real. In real life, so it goes, talents are wasted, marriages fail, people get sick, and die. Let’s face it, it’s grim out there.

Most of the time, that’s the truth if this life is all there is. Fairy tales of the past took for granted that life went on after death. Marriage was the natural end of those stories because it is the end of our story, the marriage of Christ and his bride, the Church. But we don’t get there without facing reality at the beginning.

How close Rapunzel and Daniel and Parr are to the Kingdom of God! If only Rapunzel could fail, and Daniel could be insignificant, and Parr could stop striving. Up against reality, they might hear a voice, or a gentle prompting: “You are my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.”

More than anyone, children are disposed to hear this—that it is enough to be children and nothing more. This shouldn’t be taken away from them.