Reading to Deprived Children

Lecture given at the 6th USBBY Regional Conference

Callaway Gardens, Georgia

28-30 October 2005

María Candelaria Posada

IBBY Director of Communications and Project Development

Reading to Deprived Children

Reading to deprived children is a topic that can be approached from many disciplines: education, psychology, sociology, social work, among others. This is because the stress falls on the deprived children rather than on the reading. And this is good, of course. First the deprived children.

I am going to talk about deprived children I know of: internally displaced, utterly poor, living in conditions that classify as extreme poverty by all the international agencies. Bogotá, my home, the capital of Colombia, is a huge city of seven million people. Its growth takes place without any planning and the authorities scarcely can keep track of what is happening in the outskirts of the city. Every day, dozens of people arrive in the hills and the valleys that surround Bogotá, fleeing from the war-torn countryside. They come with nothing, they set up their “homes” in neighborhoods where there are already others like them; their houses are made of cardboard, plastic and, if they are lucky, they will have an aluminum roof.

Many agencies, many famous people, singers, millionaires, religious communities, help. The government does what it can. But this permanent influx of people will never allow for measures that will be permanent or stable, because resources do not grow in the proportion these people from the countryside keep arriving in the city.

I do not want to sound pathetic. I just want you to know that I have been reading to deprived children (I worked for a little less than a year with the Office of Bogotá’s Major at the Cultural Institute.) I have seen little grim faces that lit up when I started to read.

Nobody will discuss the good effects that books can have on deprived children, especially among the younger ones. It is the same good effect that a book can have on anyone, children, adult, deprived, “normal”.

What I would like to look with you is why. What is it that reading can give specifically? What kind of relief it offers?

Since ancient times, since Plato in Greece and Horace in Rome to our times, many authors and critics defend the idea that one of the reasons why people must read is because they learn from reading. Prodesse et delectare, to instruct and to please, this was the function of literature for a very long time, until Romanticism placed the inner world of the individual in the protagonist role. And then, modern novel took a whole new path and narrative soon was not talking about heroes but anti-heroes.

It is, then, no wonder that literature has been seen and used as a tool to get children to learn not only concepts but also rules of behavior. The origin of children’s books is plainly didactic.

Fortunately, in the 20th century, the rising importance of the publishing houses helped to develop different kind of books for children: textbooks and literature for children and the genre itself developed with thousands of authors and millions of books telling stories to children for the sake of the story, for the joy of it, just because reading is a pleasure.

I would ask you to stay here for a moment, thinking with me how true it is that reading instructs: a book can tell us everything about the place and time it is written in. The language use, the characters’ ethics, the plot itself are telling us a great amount of things, if we pause to listen to them. There is a wonderful example at hand: Persepolis, the story of a childhood, by Marjane Satrapi, which we are going to discuss Sunday morning. I learned a lot about everyday life and social classes in urban Iran. Literature is always telling us about the historical context in which it is written. But that is a completely different thing from the straightforward didactic purpose of a book.

Bibliotherapy has been regarded in this light: how to “mold the children´s character”, how to change their behavior or attitudes, even their ethical principles.

It is true that these violent times our children are growing in deserve our worry. The increase in delinquency, pregnancies, violence and drug addiction in teenagers is alarming and we all know how this is reinforced by mass media, which are looking only to attract more audience through the careless treatment of these illnesses of our society. Literature for adults does not offer exemplary characters neither hopeful ends. It stopped doing that a long time ago.

At The Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey, California, six pillars of character are advocated: Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring and Citizenship. And thus, Bibliotherapy with books that have characters showing these attributes is recommended.

There is one genre which offers heroes and heroines: Fantasy. But you can’t help noticing that precisely because it is that, Fantasy, readers don’t tend to liaise it with real life. It is most often thought of as a “pastime”, which doesn’t mean anything derogatory, but it is just that, a diversion.

So Bibliotherapy is regarded many times as a way to influence children and young people into some class of behavior: coping with loss or tragedy, learning to stay within the limits of what society expects of them, showing them trustworthy, honest characters and hoping that this role modeling will sift into the conscience of the readers.

And there is another meaning of Bibliotherapy, used as means of bringing some relief to tragedy stricken children; it was used this way in Venezuela some years ago, where mud slides buried the houses of thousands of people in the shores near Caracas. Bibliotherapy is also the principle behind the tsunami projects fostered by IBBY in India, Indonesia, Thailand and the other affected countries. It is indeed a beautiful experience, for those who read and for those who listen. Look in IBBY Projects for the descriptions of the projects in the Coromandel Coast in India and in Aceh in Sumatra.

The children at first are distant. Many of them have not seen picture books before. Many of them are stunned from pain, physical or emotional, and most of them are hungry. For many of these deprived children, their contacts with adults have been always a negative experience: abusive parents, repressive teachers or caretakers. It takes time to win their confidence. You cannot go into the room, open a book and start to read. You have to practice all the reading animation techniques you know to show the children what really moves them: that you care about them.

And this is what I want to point out: Bibliotherapy is about caring more than about books. Music therapy, Drawing therapy, Sports therapy or “Ludo therapy”, therapy through play, any of these will work with deprived children. Because deprivation is more an emotional state, in childhood and adolescence, than a physical one. Of course, material deprivation has everlasting effects: lack of good food, of good clothing, overcrowding, leave inerasable scars in the brains and minds of the little ones.

But emotional deprivation can be worst because it can prevent the children from trying to change their situation: resilience will be difficult with emotionally deprived children (but we will talk some more about this later.)

When you are reading to children like those of very poor neighborhoods in Bogotá, as I did with many other people, you wonder: what would be more important? Give them food or read to them? It is a very difficult question to answer.

In one of the reading groups, there was a couple, sister and brother, I never knew how old they were because deprived children always look shorter and less developed than their real age. They came the first time to their teacher and told her they had stomach ache because their father -the mother had died- had not given them anything to eat in a day and a half. I did what guilty bourgeois do: I gave money to the teacher and asked her to buy them both a good lunch. I felt guilty and powerless to change the situation. But then we started the reading session, which came of course with animators and a beautiful bookshelf and everything that could help to make the session a wonderful experience for the children, I saw the faces of these two children completely transported away from their problems, with that intense look of joyful concentration. And I thought, both, you have to give them both, food, yes, but reading too.

So, reading to deprived children can do much good but, if it is understood merely as a therapeutic tool, any other therapy works the same way. Literature’s specificity can’t be found here.

When reading about resilience in the Resilience Net from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I was not surprised to find that poverty is associated with adversity. Poverty stricken children have a double risk: physical illness, family stress, insufficient social support, and parental depression, especially in the mother.

Resilience, defined as the ability to overcome adversity, to adapt, to recover and access a productive, meaningful life, is difficult to appear where the childhood influences are too negative. Girls, not surprisingly again, seem to be less vulnerable in preadolescent years than boys to the psychosocial risks of poverty.

Resilient children have shown:

Higher socio-economical level, no grave illnesses, they haven’t had early separation or losses and they have had a warm relationship with at least one primary caretaker. In other words, there have been positive influences in their early childhood; someone has shown love and care to these children. They draw their strength from that early love someone gave them.

From a very early age, I would say from around 2 to 3 years of age, children are able to identify with the character in a story. This identification, which in some way or another always happens when you are reading a fiction book that you like, is the first of the advantages of reading to deprived children. Identification works, as in many therapies, to understand you are not alone with your problem.

But it also works as role modeling; to wish to be like the character in a story is a form of identification. To wish not to be like a character is another form of identification. All of these processes which go on when a child or an adult allow themselves to be interested in a narrative work are going to the innermost part of human beings: one’s own self.

Chosen appropriately by a caring adult, books offer hope and courage.

(Let me name some of the characters I remember from my childhood reading: Heidi, Jo in Little Women, Alice, all those princesses that fell asleep and were awoken with a kiss, Scherazad (in a children’s version), a little later the delightful Claudine by Colette, the French writer…)

The child’s identification with a fictional character can provide something of the warmth given by a caring adult.

Another of the characteristics of literature is that it is telling a story, a structured tale, a plot with beginning, conflict, resolution, with characters that act in a certain way. And it is a tale that seems real, another of the characteristics of narrative fiction: its verisimilitude. And children are very good at detecting verisimilitude, they will accept tales with fantastic elements, but they have to seem real. (I think that is precisely the success of Harry Potter.)

Stories have a structure that gives some sort of security for children. When they ask to be read a story over and over again is because they enjoy hearing what they already know. The story leads small readers through a path that is never threatening. There will always be a resolution, an ending, usually happy.

It is very important to have in mind the role of humor: children who laugh live better, human beings who laugh live better. In a poverty stricken environment, humor is very hard to find. Books that can make children laugh are really setting a foundation for resilience.

And of course there is the playfulness of language. Children are familiar with it through rhymes and folk poetry. But there are books which allow us to realize that words can have many different meanings and be symbols for many emotions. In Latin America there is a wonderful poet for children, the Argentinean María Elena Walsh, of course she is untranslatable. Another writer from Brazil, the Andersen prize winner Lygia Bojunga, is another example of this.

Not every child will accept the gift of literature; readers have always been and will continue being a minority, but those who receive it will have it for the rest of their lives.

I want to finish quoting Montaigne, the French essayist, who said: There is not a single sorrow that one hour of reading cannot take away.

Callaway Gardens, 29 October 2005/mcp