Children's Books: Human or Animal Character?

This week’s article summary is Children's Books with Humans Have Greater Moral Impact Than Animals

On the one hand, this article made sense but on the other it surprised me.

As younger children are literal and concrete, it makes sense that a book’s moral is more easily reinforced with human characters in the story.

But one would think that even young kids would see the moral in a story with animal characters: after all, sharing is sharing and being nice is being nice whether the doer is a person or an animal.

Perhaps younger children recognize that stories with animal characters are make believe and ones with humans are more realistic, and hence more applicable to their lives and actions.

Regardless I don’t think we’ll start seeing more children’s books with human rather than animal characters: Frog and Toad mostly likely won’t be replaced by the Kim and Kylie!

Joe

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Forget the morals that millennia of children have learned from the Hare and the Tortoise and the Fox and the Crow: Aesop would have had a greater effect with his fables if he’d put the stories into the mouths of human characters, at least according to new research.

Existing studies showed that before age six are more reluctant to share.

Reading a book about sharing can have an immediate effect on children’s pro-social behavior. However, the type of story characters significantly affects whether children became more or less inclined to behave in a pro-social manner. After hearing the story containing real human characters, young children became more generous. In contrast, after hearing the same story but with anthropomorphized animals or a control story, children became more selfish.”

The finding is surprising given that many stories for young children have human-like animals.

From Aesop to the Gruffalo via Winnie-the-Pooh, talking animals play a major part in children’s literature. A 2002 review of around 1,000 children’s titles found that more than half of the books featured animals or their habitats, of which fewer than 2% depicted animals realistically, the majority anthropomorphizing them.

We tell stories to children for many reasons, and if the goal is to teach them a moral lesson then one way to make the lesson more accessible to children is to use human characters.

Chris Haughton, author and illustrator of animal picture books including Oh No, George! and Shh! We Have a Plan, felt that while “a simple instructional moral message might work short term”, the stories that have longer impact are the ones that resonate deeply. “I read Charlotte’s Web as a child and I know that made a big impression on me. I thought about it for a long time after I read the story. I identified with the non-human characters. That, among other things, did actually turn me into a lifelong vegetarian. I think a truly engaging and quality story that resonates with the child will be replayed in their mind and that has the real effect on them and the course of their life,” he said.

Picture book author Tracey Corderoy said that in her experience, “where the main characters of a moral tale are animals as opposed to humans, the slight distancing that this affords the young child does a number of important things. It softens the moral message a little, making it slightly more palatable. Some would feel that this waters it down and makes it less effective. But the initial ‘saving-face’ that using animals brings quite often results, I feel at least, in keeping a child reader engaged.”

Kes Gray, the author of the bestselling rhyming animal series Oi Frog and Friends, was unperturbed by the researchers’ findings. “Authors and illustrators have no need to panic here, as long as we keep all of the animal protagonists in all of their future stories unreservedly cuddly. Big hair, big eyes and pink twitchy noses should pretty much nail it,” he said.