Children's books front-load grace on a nervous system
Stories involve themes of friendship, connections, care, love, gentleness, kindness, love, forgiveness.
Stories often feature animals and other natural elements (plants, seasons, weather...). They seem to serve as approachable proxies for human behaviours and complexities.
From my playful engineering rhythm, I'm seeing children's books as about front-loading grace - trying to develop pathways/nerves/muscles/capacity for grace - which will later benefit adult life. Front-loading kindness. Front-loading care.
I don't see them as necessarily intended to deliver specific outcomes - like a fully changed world by the time the child becomes an adult, or as mission statements for the child to carry into adulthood. I see them as purposed to develop a capacity to participate in adulthood with as much grace as possible. That capacity may be high, may be low, may prove inadequate in some situations, and may fluctuate over time.
A beautiful engineering design/mechanism to me!
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This is an explanation/seeing I created for my satiety. This is what I see present at the heart of sentences like "reading during childhood can change lives", and "every child a reader".
(Of course, there are several other benefits/effects of reading in childhood: language learning, relational/social understanding, visual perception and several others I don't know.)
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Engineering element(s) present in this post:
front-loading: to distribute/allocate/place something more in the first/initial parts than in its later parts.