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Inside the Blue Book
Deconstruct the Bunny
November/December 2003
by Jennifer L. Holley
CSDC 360a
“Children’s Picture Books and the Inner World of Childhood”
Faculty:
Kirsten Dahl, Associate Clinical Professor at the Child Study Center and Psychoanalyst
Lynn Reiser, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Author/Illustrator
Just like in nursery school, every class of this residential college seminar begins with story time. “Picture books are part of an oral tradition. For children to understand the books, they have to be read aloud,” says Dr. Lynn Reiser, who teaches the class with Dr. Kirsten Dahl. The two are psychoanalysts, and Reiser is the author and illustrator of 20 children’s books; in the seminar, they use classic picture books to teach undergraduates about the developing mind of the child.
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Goodnight Moon is not all sweetness and light.
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The class examines each book first as an art object and then as a means to understand child development, from infancy through early childhood. The books are chosen for their success in capturing moments that are particular to certain ages. Ruth Krauss’s The Happy Day appears in the early unit on babies: the story follows animals as they wake up from hibernation and start dancing around, ending with them all standing around a yellow flower—the only object in color in the entire book. The book, Dahl says, mirrors a young child’s own “simple adventure of discovery.” But a child who loves The Happy Day or Pat the Bunny as a baby may well have no need for it several months down the road.
For toddlers, Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd '30, captures the difficulty of separating from the known world when going to bed. The gentle repetition, as the bunny says “goodnight” to each object in the room, can be soothing. But the book is also startling. “Goodnight nobody” appears on a blank page, and darkness creeps into the pictures in an angular, subtle way. But this, says Dahl, is the truth of childhood: “It’s not all sweetness and light.”
For their final projects, students may choose to write a research paper or their own children’s book. The last meeting is a dinner during which students present their work to each other and to a children’s book editor. For the young authors, such an opportunity may start them on a new developmental path of their own.  |
