It’s not that these books are particularly bad. What they are is safe, from the perspective of the publisher, the retailer, and, finally, the reader. There is little danger of their being commercial failures and little danger of finding the kind of energy that informs the late Shel Silverstein’s books (Where the Sidewalk Ends). Celebrity books are part of the homogenization that kidlit is especially prone to.
Another problem is that picture books, with their four-colour illustrations, are proportionally more expensive to produce than adult novels, but sell for less. They are a financial risk, a factor that invites conservatism. Some publishers try to pre-sell foreign rights to help offset production costs, following the model of Hollywood films. It helps to have a celebrity to front your book at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, where world rights are sold. Some of this decline is simple demographics; the baby boomers’ offspring are now heading into adolescence. There are a lot of market forces working against picture books, and finally, there is the issue of the reader: is childhood coming to an end?
Childhood is an invention, to a degree. In the Middle Ages, in the Eurocentric model, it was exclusive to the upper classes. Children of the less privileged had engaged the adult world by the age of seven, and there was little difference between what adults knew and what children knew. “The absence of literacy, the absence of the idea of education, the absence of the idea of shame—these are the reasons why the idea of childhood did not exist in the medieval world,” wrote Neil Postman in his 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood.
The late sixteenth century ushered in the notion that people are innately evil, so children should be moulded or, even better, whipped into moral shape, which meant suppressing or punishing most childish impulses. In the early years of industrialization, children became an economic asset among the working class, with most members of larger families employed in the factory. The literature that evolved in this period was essentially oral and cautionary. The German folk tales that the Brothers Grimm famously collected, published in 1812–15, were useful parables that warned against the real dangers of forests and strangers and family. Greed and pride were punished with Teutonic efficiency, often involving something being chopped off.
Childhood was legally defined in the nineteenth century with child-welfare acts and labour reform, and a conceptual model flowered. As soon as the idea of childhood was established, the idea of escaping its realities appeared in books. Huckleberry Finn (1884), the fount of American literature, told the story of escape from a hypocritical, straitened society. As Huck told the Widow Douglas, hell sounds like a lot more fun than heaven. And then more escape: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. Childhood, Postman argued, was a creation of the printing press: books, or at least literacy, created children. And now they are in danger of disappearing, casualties of television and the Internet. The golden era of childhood, according to Postman, was between 1850 and 1950.
Since 1950, there has been an increased merging of the children’s world and the adult world. Pop culture produces a society where children grow up early and quickly, and adults are increasingly infantilized. A six-year-old and a fifteen-year-old don’t read the same books but they see the same images: Britney Spears’s choreographed sexuality, advertisements for toys and clothes, the frantic teen comedies on TV, ads for Internet porn. They know the same catchphrases and slang. As in the Middle Ages, children know what adults know. There is a parallel between the lustful, squalid folk revels seen in a Bruegel painting and the lustful squalid world seen on television, all of it witnessed first-hand by children. Back then the equality among adults and children was the result of collective ignorance; now, it is based on the unbridled dissemination of information.
The slow collapse of childhood as an idea is often rolled into the death-of-family-values mantra that has worked so well as a political slogan. Family values succeeds as a concept because it is wonderfully elastic and essentially devoid of meaning. Does it mean parents who stay together, or the embrace of (the right) faith or good table manners? The collapse of conventional morality has been a rallying cry for every generation of the last century.
When people speak of the death of childhood, they often mean the death of innocence. A three-year-old is the last connection to a pre-lapsarian world. By four, there are rumours of reality with all its baggage. Like Adam and Eve, four-year-olds prefer experience to innocence. We all do. Yet there is the strong desire for innocence to exist somewhere, in some form. As my three-year-old son loses his own innocence, it isn’t his loss that I mourn, a loss that is both inevitable and necessary. I mourn my own loss; he is my last visceral connection to that perspective.
Despite the warnings, childhood probably won’t disappear. It will continue to evolve though. From the child as labourer in the Industrial Age we now have the child as consumer. Capitalism is both a reinforcer of childhood, a profitable state, and an agent of change. As the child becomes consumer, the market has become more divided into mass-market and high-end books, the former appealing to the child, the latter to his dismayed parents. There is also less emphasis on back-list titles other than classics like Goodnight Moon; consumption is about the present. These days, picture books have a shorter lifespan, just like the children who read them.
If picture books are on the wane, Young Adult fiction is thriving. “You should write YA,” a publisher told me. “That’s where the money is.” Like childhood, the genre is an invention. In the 1950s, the book world was largely polarized into children’s books and adult books. There were books that bridged the gap (Anne of Green Gables, Huckleberry Finn), but not that many. The YA genre as we know it today didn’t exist. In most libraries at the time, the adult section was closed to children or else they had to make requests for adult books. Librarians appealed to publishers, asking for a literature that addressed this inequity. The result was YA.
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