It is understandable that it is difficult to cope with fear and sorrow when encountering traumatic experiences such as death, violence, abuse, war and natural disaster. If dealing with these challenges is not easy for adults, then it is certainly much harder for children. The key reason for creating a happy ending in children’s books, particularly for very young children, is to protect them from the violent, the hopeless and the negative side of life. Adults’ and educators’ first intention is to “protect” children from “encounters” with pain, loss and fearful themes addressed in children’s literature (Trousdale, 1989:70; Oria-Iriarte, 2003:214). Nevertheless, Hope (2007: 290) argues that children need to understand what she calls “the reality of modern life” for example, difficult subject matter such as war, in order to meet difficulties in their own
lives and those of others. Roni Natov (2002: 220) also points out that a book for children “must not leave the child-reader in despair. And although what evokes happiness varies from child to child…a poetics for children requires a delicate rendering of hope and honesty.” However, it may be appropriate for children to realise that life is not always joyful and to help them to accept difficulties in life and to broaden their understanding of traumatic experiences. Like Bettelheim (1976), I believe that if adults share stories with negative aspects of life with young readers, it is important to support and help them to develop and maintain hope and love. Pullman (2005, Channel 5) argues that:
A story should not leave children without any hope; it should not leave them bereft of every kind of consolation. In the words of Samuel Johnson: ‘the true aim of writing is to enable the readers the better to enjoy life or to endure it.’ So if a story ends sadly, then there must be some sort of strength in it which will help the child to cope with sadness or loss. A book that says to the child: “the universe is a filthy place and there is nothing to do about it but despair or kill yourself” is not very much help, is it? It is probably not very good as a children’s book.
Children’s literature of trauma may or may not have happy endings; however, it is important that these books end with meaningful and positive messages for young readers so they feel able to face difficulties. This research sets out to find out whether children’s literature of trauma can be used to help children cope in a positive way with the negative effects of trauma. Nodelman and Reimer (1996:86) claim that:
To deprive children of the opportunity to read about confusing or painful matters like those they might actually be experiencing will either make literature irrelevant to them or else leave them feeling they are alone in their thoughts or experience.
Stories are not merely for enjoyment but also offer readers opportunities to gain new insights, thoughts and feelings through different experiences expressed by the authors. Readers may feel they are not alone when they face similar experiences or encounter emotional reactions of characters. Wuthnow
(1991:179) cites W. H. Auden: “You cannot tell people what to do. You can only tell them parables.” Worden (1983:4) also points out a similar idea that violence or death cannot be omitted from children’s literature that deals honestly with these issues.
My research sets out to discover whether careful teaching using particular texts helps to reduce children’s fear, give them a way of coping with their emotions and find solutions if they do encounter hardship. I intend to investigate whether in order to protect children from the sudden pain of traumatic and difficult experiences, it is helpful to introduce them to stories that offer scope for them to experience through their imagination what they have not experienced directly and to encourage them to express their feelings of universal empathy, love and hope (Robertson, 1999:3).
Many children read or listen to fairy tales in their childhood. These stories help children to become familiar with one kind of genre of children’s literature as well as to understand the moral, emotional and realistic issues and problems implied within the fairy tales. These include difficult areas that children have to face when they are very young, such as poverty and death in
The Little Match Girl (1987) by Hans Christian Andersen and fear and abandonment in Hansel and Gretel (2003) by The Brothers Grimm. Children become aware of cruelty and sadness through the stories they are told or read. Even if fairy tales are not discussed, opportunities to read about loss and sadness will make children aware of the negative aspects of life. Fairy tales, to some extent, offer young readers a sense of consolation, “for every individual lives in constant fear of the magical aggression of others and the general social atmosphere in the village is one of mutual suspicion, of latent danger and hidden hostility, which pervade every aspect of life” (Schoeck, 1969:51- 52). Fairy tales possess a dimension of wonder or magic as well, whether that dimension is achieved through talking animals, magic helpers or evil witches (Trousdale, 1989:77). Some children may believe that difficult situations only happen in fairy tales and that the problems encountered in stories are resolved or end happily. Nevertheless, young readers are exposed to the cruel universal
human problems expressed in fairy tales, such as loss, death, brutality and abandonment. Since the features of fairy tales explore human struggles, it is perhaps not surprising that parents and educators have used them, perhaps unconsciously, as a secure and supportive framework for children who are learning how to deal with difficult areas of their lives (Tucker, 2006:202-203; Ballentine and Hill, 2000:12).
It is hard to protect children from having access to harsh aspects of life through all kinds of media (such as publications, audio and visual media) no matter how unwilling adults are for their children to know about difficult issues at a young age (Bettelheim, 1976:7; Singer, 2006: 310). However, through those media or perhaps from children’s real experiences, they learn about difficult situations in families and societies, such as divorce, separation, difference, loss and death, abuse, both physical or sexual, poverty, starvation, natural disasters, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis, terrorism and war, such as World War I, World War II, the terrorist attacks of September 11 and the war in Iraq (Cullinan and Galda, 1998:230). Children try to make sense of this information and cope with the pain and grief they meet in real life and in books (Russell, 2000:209; Goforth, 1998:142, 149-151).