You know that elementary school teacher who hat fry ? The one who seems to loathe not just the casual donkeywork of lesson , but also the very sight of students ? These sort of people might make you wonder : Why go into a professing serving midget people you have no forbearance for ?
Ifchildren ’s book authorswho allegedly disliked kids are any measure , the answer is a matter of vocation letdown and misjudgments .
Abiographyof Margaret Wise Brown — author of " Goodnight Moon " and " The Runaway Bunny " among other book — reconfirms what other biography of Brown haveasserted : She desired to save playscript for adult , no matter how heavy and beloved her kids ' account book were . But did she detest children ?
That would make for a sport newspaper headline , but it does n’t reflect statements Brown made on the depicted object . She says in a1946 Life magazine profilethat as a hunter who writes cordially about cuddly tool , she ’s full of contradiction . " Well , I do n’t especially like children , either , " she says in the interview . " At least not as a radical . I wo n’t let anybody get away with anything just because he ’s piddling . " She does n’t precisely gag at the great deal of a cooing infant , but perhaps acknowledges that she has as much patience for children as she has for any grownup .
FromA.A. Milne , who did n’t need to be stereotype as a writer of only kids ' fib , toBeatrix Potter , who marry comparatively lately in life , many a children ’s generator has been called a hypocritical kid - hater . But several of the authors simply felt the means Brown did — ambivalent about baby ’s literature , and the little prestige it seemed to bestow .
A lot of authors seem to be aggroup into a family of " child - loathing " just because they did not have kids . Theodor Geisel ( aka Dr. Seuss ) never had children , and when asked how we write so well for them , he reportedlyreplied , " You make ‘em . I ’ll amuse ‘em . "
Then there are the folks who confuse writers ' body of work with their lives . Roald Dahlwas accusedof not care children , possibly because he portrayed some children ( see : " Charlie and the Chocolate Factory " ) as bratty or intend . But Dahl was a beginner of five who delighted in his children . And if he truly did detest children , he must ’ve resent himself for saving about3,000 of them by helping to contrive a valveto assuage his son ’s hydrocephalus .
While Brown and her workfellow might have had morevibrant , eccentric livesthan their sweet-smelling books suggest , let ’s not accuse them of biting the hired hand that feeds them .
