After a reading I did once for 10 to 12-year-olds, a little girl put up her hand and asked timidly, "Do you ever write books where the mammy dies?" Afterwards the teacher explained to me that the child's mother had been murdered, and a family member was suspected of being the killer.
This sort of heart-stopping incident is not common, but some children do experience dreadful traumas in their lives, and coming up against this fact, as one does when one regularly meets children, makes it hard to stomach the sentimental myths that adults seem to harbour about books for children.
One such myth is that books for children shouldn't deal with "hard" topics like death, violence or family breakdown. Well, it would be great if life didn't dole out "hard" things to kids, but it does, and the conspiracy of pretence that it doesn't, which children's writers are sometimes expected to be part of, seems to me, at best, dishonest and patronising.
But then, our whole view of childhood is often sentimental and patronising. And this rather precious view of childhood - apart from being reprehensible in itself - at once lays unsustainable burdens on the children's writer and excludes him or her from serious consideration as a professional and a literary craftsperson.
On the one hand, children's writers are expected to evince a saintly devotion to education and "reading" - which, by the way, is generally viewed not as a tool that it is essential to acquire in order to live and succeed in our literate, logocentric world, but as some sort of moral good that it is the writer's duty to nurture in the young. On the other hand, we are expected to live in a literary vacuum where our work is seldom seriously reviewed or even discussed (with the honourable and admirable exception of Children's Books in Ireland).
I don't count three plot-summarising lines in a Christmas or summer children's special supplement - that's publicity, and as such very valuable, but it does not offer us a serious peer critique of our work.
Nor do I count reviews by children. Much as I respect children's powers of discrimination - and they are ruthless critics - they are not equipped with the critical apparatus to appraise the work even of children's authors in a way that affirms our status as serious workers in our field and that either encourages us or gives us pause to reflect on problems in our work. The opinions of children obviously provide valuable feedback to the writer, but in themselves they are not sufficient to constitute a serious consideration of writing for children.
Occasional reviews do appear, of course, but so rare is the opportunity that reviewers daren't waste precious space by giving a negative review of a children's book, and so only positive reviews tend to appear. Very gratifying, I'm sure, but nobody really benefits from this lack of critical rigour. And it's not only the reviewing process that is deficient. Children's authors are generally excluded from the whole literary enterprise. The Babaro children's arts festival in Galway goes some way towards redressing the balance, and the Aspects festival of Irish writing in Bangor is a notable exception to the rule that children's literature is ignored by festival organisers. There are probably other exceptions, but by and large, children's writers are not invited to address conferences, summer schools or writers' gatherings. I believe my own forthcoming residency at the Irish Writers' Centre is the first such residency ever awarded to a children's writer here. It as if we live in a ghetto with no communications systems to the outside literary world.
Similarly, the Bisto Book of the Year award, the high point of the literary year for those interested in books for children, is generally ignored by the media. The shortlist is rarely published, much less debated, and year after year we children's writers see an opportunity for lively debate on our work passed up by the literary media with what we must assume is a yawn.
What is the explanation for this failure to treat children's literature with any seriousness? Could it be a perception that children's books are somehow not a branch of literature at all, but a branch of something else - education or psychology or parenting - anything but literature?
I tried to interest a broadcaster once in doing something on children's books, but he kept saying: "We haven't got a slot for children's books, we don't do a children's books programme." I couldn't get him to see that you can make a slot. You can do it in an ordinary books programme. They are books after all. Nobody says: "We can't review biographies, we haven't got a biographies programme/page."
I can't help seeing the refusal to take writing for children seriously as part of a general snobbery that relegates children's affairs to some sort of minority-interest subcategory. It seems to be part of the same moral continuum that takes the issue of daycare for children seriously only when there starts to be a workforce shortage; that allows children who have had to be taken into the care of the state to be released onto the streets at the age of 16 or younger without proper follow-up or aftercare; that responds to teenage motherhood - a situation involving at least two children - with an abortion referendum.
We have a powerful sense of ourselves as a child-loving people. We are not. We have, in truth, scant regard for our children. And our sentimental, misguided and uncritical approach to books for children, a topic that should be hotly debated in a child-centric society, is merely a symptom.
When I was 11, I read that the problem with adults was that they had forgotten what it is like to be a child. This struck a deep chord, and I made a decision there and then to remember. I think I have kept faith with that promise to myself, and that's why I can write for children; I have an empathy with them, based on a deliberately cultivated memory. It's not that I love children. (What writer for adults is expected to love their audience? The idea is absurd.) Empathy is essential; soupy sentiment about children is not.
That's probably why I write specifically for children, but it's not why I write. I do that for the same reason that anyone writes: it's the challenge of making the words work. Yes, there is the extraordinary imaginative scope of this kind of writing, the opportunity to explore forgotten, joyous corners of the imagination; yes, there is the permission to write for my 11-year-old self. But that's not really it. Neither is it the money (what money?), the honour and glory (what etc?) nor the opportunity to influence the young.
It's the daily struggle to see and hear my characters, to find the word that will most precisely convey the atmosphere I want to create, to make the wretched plot work out. It's the writing, God help us, the writing - the one thing that seems to go unrecognised in the whole endeavour.
Dr Siobhan Parkinson reads in Galway's Babaro International Arts Festival for children on Friday, October 22nd in Galway City Library at 11 a.m. Further information on the festival, which runs from October 12th-17th, on 091-509702/3 from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
