by Sammy Stein

Created on: September 28, 2008

As an adult you will be made up, emotionally, from your experiences to date. You will be the kid who failed to remember their lines in the school play, you will be the person who won the 100 metre race, you will be the guy who fell and broke his arm when he was 5 years old. You will be the kid who fell in love at the tender age of 7 with the girl two years older who broke his heart. All these things and far too many more to mention, make you who you are. The same goes for books. Just as real events change and shape children's lives, so do the characters and events they read about as a child.

Children's books give our children the gift of working their imagination. They give them ideas to feed and work on. Characters become real, are given a birth, a voice and reality by being brought to life in children's imaginations. A child's mind is virgin territory, slowly filled and changed by things they experience both real and imagined. So, characters, what they do, how they treat people, places they live and people who affect them, have an effect on the young reader.

A child's mind is seeking answers, looking for clues and pointers from the adults' world. They recieve them in pictures from TV, Videos and and DVDS, they can play games, X-box, PS3, outside games where they learn to interact with others but how do they learn how to do this?

They get many pointers - good and bad- by watching the adults around them but also they get clues from books. The characters in children's books are often those with a moral to tell, a tale of good overcoming evil, morality, love, support and naivity. They feed the child's imagination - given the great skill of a truly good writer- and begin to take life. they also allow a child to take part in activities or events which are completely outside ther real life situations like wars, battles and plagues miraculous events or historically important times. Books allow a child to start developing empathy and understand the felings of others.

The writer has the power to create in a child's mind whoever they like. So they must describe carefully, assign emotions with aplomb and make the character real yet one which will fit easily into a child's life without overpowering or frightening them. They can also show the child a bigger world than the one they live in. Children's books can tell stories of distant lands,or other religions,customs or even places where people have completely different beliefs to them. At the same time, they must not make these places or different people frightening and the young mind is affected deeply by the author's craft in creating characters and emotions.

Older children can learn about emotions, responsibilities and relationships by reading. A book , unlike real life ,can be revisited and taken at the child's pace. They can read the same book at different stages or re-read passages so they have time to get the real essence from them and improve their understanding. They realise that their emotional response may be different at different times. Importantly, they realise that characters in books go through all the emotions and changes they do.

A truly outstanding book - one which touches deep at the soul of a young reader- will be with that child always. They will take guidance from the characters, it will create a desire in them and it will be part of their phsyche for a great many years. Books certainly affect children and the skill of the adult writer is to write with care - for they are feeding the minds of the future.

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