Defining Children’s Literature

ways to suit the various stages of child ren’s development. Therefore, the depiction of each theme will be adjusted to children’s stage of development. Children need to learn and understand about the dark side of life because sooner or later children will face the dark side of life and it is unavoidable. Southhall 1975:12 states that children live in a world, not in a pedestal and they are out among people and interact with each other. Death might still look far away for them but coping with death might happen anytime and they should be prepared to feel the fear, pain, and loneliness as a part of the emotions. Children need to put themselves in someone else’s shoes to realize that this world does not only consist of happiness but also other dark emotions. Children need to see and understand that anything bad could happen to anyone. If it is not to them, it could happen to their family or friends. Furthermore, the sad feeling of watching someone suffering is a part of sympathy which every child should learn as a part of life lessons. As Mehta 2013:1 explains in her article about children who need to have sympathy for others, “children need to read terrifying situations in order to empathize with characters who endure those situations. Those characters, learning to stay strong and amid struggle, are part of a larger cultural shift in how we express ourselves about the things we’ve endured”. The existence of dark themes in children’s literature is to help children to cope with the feeling that deals with the dark side of life. The important part of the death is not the death as a loss but more on how children should cope with the feeling of loss, so the after effect of the death is more important to children. It is emphasized by Corr 2004:338 who believes that children need to understand about death because they need to learn how to grief and cope with it. Children need to understand about the concept of death, pain, loss, illness, and many other dark side of life. In the case of death, children should understand that death is a natural process that will be through by all the living things in the world. Children need to cope with the feeling of sadness, loss, and grief. Jimmerson and Lazarus in Heath et al. 2008:259 state that “grieving is defined as personal thoughts and feeling associ ated with loss”. They continue to explain that a loss triggers children to feel the grief and it involves experience of mixture emotions in response to the loss. Although the grief is associated with death, it is also associated with the disruption of familiar comfort and security, including divorce, family financial difficulty, and loss of a friend. To see so many children’s books contain dark themes nowadays, parents might think that dark themes in children’s literature seem more varied and darker. However, the readers might not realize that the dark themes have been a part of children’s literature since a long time ago and even folklore of children also brought dark side of life as a themes in a story. Bates 2007:48 argues that the children’s classic folklore has been started with the universal dark themes of separation. There are many classic works of children’s literature that brought separation as a theme. The separations are usually between children and parents or step-parents. Some of classic stories are The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Both stories depict the main characters whose separated from their family and had to deal with the current condition to survive. The classic fairy tale has already started to bring dark themes to children’s reading materials. The nowadays theme seems darker to most of the parents because the present children’s literature brought the reality of life closer to children’s perspective. Divorce, illness, pain, and also death are becoming more and more v ivid in present children’s literature. According to Eccleshare 2013:par.5, “today’s book for children tackle the current problems of the world at both a domestic and a global level; they are sometimes bleak in themes but may also be inspiring, unrevealin g difficulties in a wonderful story”. In the article, Eccleshare also explains that a classic novel like Charlotte’s Web also brings death as one of the topics. Children will mostly remember the adventure as much as the darker subject matter. Thus, nowaday s children’s text maybe the same as the subject matter.

B. Pleasure of Children’s Literature

Children might have difficulties to understand the complexity of ideas, but the difficulties do not stop children to seek pleasure when they experienced many kinds of emotions. In fact, their source of pleasure could be simpler than what adults thought. People seek pleasure in reading literature, they read for pleasures. The simplest pleasure might be found in enlightenment when children read literary works. It could be the pleasure of knowing simple words from the text or might be a pleasure comes from the background of the reader while reading particular events which evoke the past memories Lukens, Smith, Coffel, 2013:2. In relation to the simple pleasure, every story could give emotions to children. Events and emotions in life are also parts of pleasure children should enjoy and discover. Pleasure is not only found when they read certain stories but also when they have vicarious experience and try to deal with it. Pleasure is the main attraction of children’s book, as stated by Greenby 2008:67, “children book should be judge for the pleasure it gives, for its style and its quality”. The potent pleasure in children’s book should be fairly judged as the source of vicarious experience to take children into a whole new level of enjoyment and excitement. All the new discovery contains in a text could be the source of potent pleasure. The experience of happiness and sadness are both pleasure for children. Furthermore, Lukens, Smith, Coffel 2003:6 also explain that children seek the same pleasure as adults when they read stories, but the difference is their source of pleasure. Children have a limited source of pleasure because of their limited experience. Thus, children’s stories are displayed in a simpler way.