Children’s Literature for Children
from these people’s expectation. Children can be as complex as adults. The character complexity is called as character development. The character
development ought to exist in c hildren’s literature. According to Lukens
1999: 80, “character development means showing the character—whether a
person or animal or object —with the complexity of a human being” in
chi ldren’s literature. Thus, child characters or animals or objects with children
quality may not be perfect humans but they can be the three-dimensional ones. Therefore, children may own both bad and good characters.
Nodelman 1996: 15 states that children’s literature has “the gulf between
their writer and intended reader”. Certainly, what makes this literature differ from other is the existence of the gulf or a gap between writers adults and
intended readers children. In addition, the researcher believes that adults may write stories according to their childhood experience in the past. These
stories can be influenced by adults’ belief and thinking or ideology. Works of c
hildren’s literature can be divided based on writers’ ideology and the way they put children and adults in the text. There are two kinds of
children’s literature namely adult-centered and child-centered children’s literature. According to McGee 2006, an adult-centered text portrays adults
as the ones with authority and knowledge and children as the ones with nostalgic image. Meanwhile, a child-centered text portrays children as the
strong, capable, caring and smart characters while adults are fallible with a lot of flaws. Thus, both texts represent
children’s position differently. The adult- centered text puts children in the lower position and establishes adult as the
source of authority. Yet, the child-centered one does the vice versa. As a result, children can be placed in lower or higher position depending on
writers’ ideology. In addition, Jacqueline Rose in Nodelman, 1992:
29 says that “children’s literature is a form of
colonization”. It means that children’s literature may “colonize” children through the way the writers adults describe the children
and childhood wrongly. Those problems reveal the way adults practice the colonization for the children. They control and seemingly educate children by
using literature and their ideology which are inherent in the text. Therefore, children may be put in lower position. The researcher disagrees if children are
placed in the lower position because children’s literature is intended for
children and places them as the central of the story. Thus , children’s literature
should put children in higher position.