Revisiting kids literature

N and I look forward to our 'reading time' everyday. For N, reading means listening and watching me bring alive to her another world filled with her favorite characters. To me, it means spending quality time with her, reliving my childhood memories and seeing these books in a new perspective - as a parent. I have consciously instilled the 'Enid Blyton' bias in N. It's a positive feedback loop I tell these stories to her with more vigour, she feeds off it and responds with equal or more energy. 

We started off with Eric Carle, Julia Donaldson and moved on to Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton, as N's capacity to understand and remember complex plot-lines grew. These books are a worthwhile investment (Eric Carle and JD are quite expensive). They are colourful, inspire imagination, build language and promote values like sharing and inclusion. From the start, I have been looking, with less success, for similar books in Tamil or Malayalam. I have to read and translate English books for N to comprehend. I want equivalent books in our regional language for N's grandparents to read to her too. Currently, they tell her Hindu mythological stories - I have come to see this as a 'can of worms'. I do understand that this is part of our culture and I grew up with these stories (and loved them) too. But now I see the 'Amar Chithra Katha' tales as reeking of violence, patriarchy, 'might is right', unreal black-and-white characterisation. 

I cannot shield my kids forever. This gives me an opportunity to make them aware of these 'forces' in our culture and build their 'self-advocacy skills' to resist it. So I let N listen to these stories and then we have long 'book review' discussions where we compare actual kids' literature with these similarly labelled, harmful books. I go into these discussions hesitatingly, worried if this is too much information for a 4-year old to handle. But I have never been disappointed by N's poise and aplomb to take it all in, weigh it in her head and arrive at her own conclusions. 

Coming back to Enid Blyton... I see my favorite childhood author in a different light now. All her stories reinforce, 'girls sew and clean up while boys 'take care' of them'. Bursts my bubble 😔. We do continue reading the Blyton books, but I filter out this biased content. The books are still filled with fun, food and adventures that N and I love. I'm waiting for N to grow up and read these books on her own and wonder why her amma presented these stories to her differently. 🤔

I am looking forward to buying works of குழந்தைக் கவிஞர் அழ. வள்ளியப்பா (Kids' poet, Azha Valliappa), trying some Tamil books from Tulika and printing some Tamil/Malayalam stories off https://storyweaver.org.in/ .