Contemporary Children’s literature should reflect the
problems of today. Children are exposed to crime, death, kidnappings, boko
haram, internally displaced people, and violence on T.V.
Children’s literature should include the realities of
life and create avenues so that children can talk about their reactions to real
life. Children literature should not include emotions that are not felt by
children. Children do not understand nostalgia, so they always look towards the
future.
Children do not feel despair, they always have hope in
any circumstances.
Children do not know cynicism, so they won’t understand
cynicism in plot.
Children are curious about life and adult activities, all
their childhood plays are re-enacted towards what they see the adults doing. So
they enact plays about family, going to the market, going to work and driving
cars and sometimes death. A child may lie down pretending to sleep when she
wants to show you how a character died on T.V.
When talking about my book'' my life as an Almajiri,'' a
nine year old girl summarised the plot to me, she talked with her hands
and an expressive face but when she got to a character’s death. She grew
quiet for a minute and clasped her hands together and stared at her hands
before she said the character died in a car accident.
In my childhood we never said the word death, we treated
it with reverence and when a classmate lost her twin. We didn’t really
understand when the teacher told us our classmate had left, so we asked
the twin and she told us he had gone on a long journey to a different land and she
pointed to the Sky.
I was listening to a seven year old read in a summer
reading program at American corner Abuja when he said ‘‘boko haram are
killing everybody, you have to be careful,’’.
I asked him about the books he liked to read and he said
he liked books about Tigers.
I asked him why, he told me they were beautiful, wild and
free.
Children have different tastes in book like adults; an
eleven year old girl who wore dresses told me she liked reading books about
princesses. She wore a pink dress and twirled the flower on her dress when she
told me shyly that she wanted to be a princess.
Another eleven year old girl only read detective books, and
she knew who was reading all the books she liked.
A nine year old girl and an eight year old boy only
wanted to read the magic bus stories. The girl said she liked books about space.They told me science was cool whilst
another eight year old boy wanted to read books about sports especially
football.A quiet eleven year old girl only wanted to read about girls
living two hundred years ago, she told
me she wanted to know about how people lived in the past. Then she looked at me
with a look I know, I was eating up her reading time.
Children will like to read entertaining books with imagination,
experience from daily or past lives,princesses, sports,space and Tigers.
