The Little Things

Isn’t it scary how the pieces of the jigsaw that make us who we are cannot be predicted?

From the young people whose adult lives have been affected by badly behaved celebrities to the children whose adult personalities may be adversely affected by reading The Bunker Diary by Kevin Brooks (winner of the 2014 Carnegie Award,) society is constantly striving to regulate what our children are exposed to, trying to mould the jigsaw pieces.

It can’t be done.

Random instances lodge in us like splinters when we’re young and no-one can foresee which of the thousands of interactions, sights and sounds that comprise a child’s daily life will resonate and which will pass by barely noticed.

The thing is, as adults, we don’t know which words spoken thoughtlessly in anger or, indeed, which moments of high praise will be the ones that shape a child forever.

That's scary.

Let’s consider Rolf Harris for a moment...OK that’s long enough…there are those who have dismissed his acts as trivial and, yes, some people would have shrugged off such unwanted attention and never given it another thought but, for others, his actions seriously impacted on their attitudes to men, relationships, sex. However, he should have known the damage he might have been doing and kept his hands to himself. Quite rightly, then, we have laws protecting us all against any kind of abuse of the body.

We also have laws protecting the minds of children from potentially damaging visual imagery. We call this certification and its purpose is to make bad films with violent or sexually explicit scenes more attractive to kids who are too young to realise that they’re watching rubbish. (Cynical? Moi?) It is ridiculous, for example, that a nine-year-old can happily devour every word of the seven Harry Potter books but can only watch the first three films.

So to The Bunker Diary and the idea that words can be harmful. Its content, allegedly (I haven’t read it yet,) makes The Hunger Games and Divergent look as benign as Winnie-the-Pooh. It has, therefore, fuelled a debate about whether YA books should be included under the umbrella of children’s fiction. I don’t want to express an opinion about this (unusual, I know) instead I want draw attention to the fact that we seem to be edging dangerously close to the idea of certificating books.

“NO!” I cry in anguish.

And I repeat, “NO!”

Please let there remain one bastion of freedom in our already overly-proscribed lives. 

There is no doubt that books can be enormously powerful. Reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and D H Lawrence’s poem Tortoise Shout in the 6^th form had profound influences on my virginal and confused sexuality: The majority of that same class probably don’t remember anything about either text. Likewise, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man* (apart from causing severe psychological damage to innocent 17 and 18 year-olds by boring them senseless for weeks on end) left me with a deeply embedded unease about hell. I don’t believe in hell in any rational way but…what if…

There is no reasoned argument that can unpick the impact of Joyce’s words. They have become an entrenched part of my being. Although I was Christened C of E and am agnostic, I carry Catholic guilt by proxy. Who knew an A level set text could have such power?

So…

Should Joyce/Plath/Lawrence et al have a 19 certificate, rendering them unfit for A level students? Or perhaps I should I throw myself into our increasingly pervasive blame-culture and sue my English teacher? Or the school? Or the government? Or the publishers? Or the estates of the authors? Or all of the above?

“NO!” I cry again, this time in frustration.

Because if those writers hadn’t shaped me, others would have (and did in very positive ways.) 

Yes, words and moving pictures can and do harm us, but, unlike physical harm, we can make choices about what children in our care can cope with watching or reading. We cannot protect children from all the bad things in the world, no matter how much we may want to, no matter how hard we try. Scraped knees and banged heads, scary villains and bad dreams, they are all part of growing up. A child who never falls over, never has a nightmare, is only exposed to happy stories, will still have their share of dark jigsaw pieces cut by a harsh word, a small injustice, the loss of something cherished or Disney's Snow White. Ultimately, we cannot shape our children’s jigsaw pieces but we can take responsibility for the way we behave and the things that we say. (See Part 2) 

* I have a German copy if anyone wants to borrow it. My fellow students gave it to me on my 18th birthday as we happened to be in Germany at the time. Bless them!! Grrrr!