Childhood Taboos In Children's Literature

Childhood taboo is a typical cultural phenomenon of childhood. It refers to some prohibitions existed in special era and culture on sex, violence, death and other cruel truths. These things are secrets of adulthood and not allowed to leak to children.This paper consists of three parts: introduction, text and conclusion. Moreover, the text is divided into three chapters.The first chapter is an overview of childhood taboo. Firstly,we distinguished three different concepts of childhood taboo. Secondly, we listed a few real examples of it. We found that there implied two hypotheses of children by analyzing those examples: one is the innocent child: the other is the vulnerable child. The first hypothesis is mainly influenced by theology, philosophy, literature and art and the second one is mainly influenced by developmental psychology. Although these hypotheses, which are essentially ideology, have made great improvement on children's living situation in the history, it will causes serious problems if we stick to it. Beyond that, because childhood taboo linked to some secrets that need media to spread, we also traced the influence of the changes of media forms on it.The second chapter aimed at exploring the influence of childhood taboo on children's literature. As an endeavor of molding children, childhood taboo will inevitably affect their bread of spirt��children's literature. Specifically,writers extremely excluded and rejected things about the instinct side of human beings and the cruel side of the real world. At the third section, we depicted the operational logic of it and pointed out that the existence of childhood taboo indicates adults use children to define themselves in a way analogous to the way in which men have defined women and colonialists have defined those they colonized,as "the other".The third chapter is about some possible ways and prospects. We believed that children were defined as "the other" is the result of dualistic way of thinking of modernity. So according to Martin Buber's Dialogue Philosophy and the views of Postmodernism, we offered two suggestions. The fist is adults should open their heart to children and change the conflicting adults-children relationship into equal dialogical relationship. The second is adults should revise the way they used to think about children and have faith in them. These two suggestions will allow adults to meet the real children and will allow children to meet the real world. We are expecting the days when children's literature writers and teachers can pass through the surface of childhood and go deeper.