Chilrdens books

Contemporary Children’s Book And A Children’s Book From Another Decade. Analyze The Two Using Comparison/Contrast Mode To Show How Either Society Is Different Or How Our Understanding Children Is Different From Either Time Period.
Children have always loved stories. Fairy tales in which a magic wand can transform the drab scullery maid into a gorgeously dressed beauty ready to leave for the ball and stories of the adventures and pranks of other school children of the type one finds in the Nancy Drew and Enid Blyton series have held sway from the day they were first told or read to a wide eyed child, to the present times.
However over the last two decades quite a few major changes have come into the social structure and more specifically, the family unit. Statistics show that in contrast to the 80s and 90s more that 60% of all children in the United States today have working mothers and the number of mothers in even a two parent family who are employed went up by close on to 40%. Currently around 27% of all children come from families with a single parent and one in every three births in the United States is out of wedlock. This along with new light thrown on methods of helping children to maximize their cognitive skills, has lead to dramatic shifts in education for children, and books which are written and published with children and young adults as the target group.
A radical change came about both in the form and content of books as the emphasis shifted from parent or teacher-directed, to student-directed reading and learning. The intention behind this was that children should develop their own understanding and imagination, not by being exposed to facts in isolation, but by having their curiosity aroused without any external stimulus in the form of rewards.
Other factors which have begun to be taken into consideration while promoting books for children are multi ethnicity, sex, including gay and lesbian fiction for children and young adults, and books which are designed with the special needs children in mind.
Just as over exposure to junk food has led to obesity in children, so also overexposure to ‘entertainment’ in every known form has led to a feeling of ennui and children now lap up nonsense verse and oddities. Old favorites like Robin Hood have lost their charm and titillate only if they are remakes. This sorry state is to some extent relieved by the new digital media.
During the last two decades the winds of change, which have been blowing through the field of children’s books as a sequel to the growing and inevitable popularity of the digital media, have finally arrived in the form of interactive books. The doors of information technology have been thrown open and text books and safe and fun online reading sites meet at web pages like yahooligians, a search engine for every inquisitive child. These young and raw future techies even have an option to type in a question and ” Ask Jeeves”. Each topic has links to satiate the natural curiosity of a young person who also has the option to go into different levels, depending on his interest and comprehension. The question ‘Where can I find myths about the solar object Jupiter’ would elicit an answer about Jupiter and then go on to his personal love life and his jealous wife Juno, ending on a note which a child could comprehend
For example, Jupiter fell in love with the lovely Io. Jupiter turned Io
into a cow to protect her from Juno. However, when Juno found out
about the affair she tied up the cow. When Io escaped, Juno sent a
gadfly to constantly sting Io for eternity. 1
Works Cited
22 February 2007

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