Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your final selection is How to Turn Your Parents Green by James Russell.
The main aim of this book is to interest children in the environment with the jokey conceit that children get the environment in a way that parents don’t, so it is the children’s job to teach the parents. I chose this because there have been a lot of books about green issues aimed at children in the last five to 10 years, and there was a big wave of them in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Maybe people want to talk to children about climate change, because they think that it will impact more on them. Or it might be to do with a long history of thinking that children are interested in nature. Probably both. What makes this book slightly different is that it takes a sort of pester-power idea, which is usually used to sell people things, and applies it to activism. It invites kids to say: We are kids, we know best and we are going to tell you what to do.
For a parent, that could be incredibly irritating!
Yes, and I have read a couple of reviews which say how awful and very irritating this is. But I think it is an appeal which has been used in children’s media for a while. There is this idea that the child knows best, which obviously goes down well with the reader and is played as a joke in the book. You see it particularly from the 60s onwards – it was a way of separating a children’s culture from an adult culture, rather than a family where everybody would read together. I suppose it stemmed from the rebellious teenage culture in the 50s and gradually trickled down to younger ages.
The Horrible Histories and Horrible Science books have a similar suggestion that kids are in the know, at least about some things. I’m not sure how I feel about the way books like these separate child and adult views. I like the idea of kids having their own culture and of respecting child perspectives, but I also think that it would be nice to have a shared, multi-generational sense of science, especially when it comes to climate issues.
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Alice Bell is a science writer based in London, specialising in relationships between science and wider society. She also teaches at Imperial College London, where she worked as a lecturer in Science Communication for several years. Bell has a PhD in children’s science media, as well as degrees in the sociology of education and the history of science. She spent many years working in the children’s galleries at the Science Museum and has worked broadly in science education, policy and media
