Title: Mommy Has a Monster on Her Back
Author: Liz Long
Date: 2024
Quote: "Using my personal experience with...trigeminal neuropathy...I wanted a story that would convey how my chronic condition impacts my life and how it varies from day to day without the material feeling intimidating or overwhelming to my young son. The story I would recite to my son soon evolved into this children's book."
So Mommy's chronic pain is portrayed as a monster whose size and color vary. Now that three-fifths of us are living with chronic disease conditions whose symptoms vary from day to day, a lot of children are likely to need some sort of explanation of the chronic condition of somebody they know. Hence this book.
According to Bruno Bettelheim, small children prefer fairy-tale explanations to realistic ones because they're not capable of understanding the more accurate explanations that rely on abstract thought. I don't know that that's true. I do know that as a small child I sometimes imagined things I couldn't quite understand in fairy-tale or TV-cartoon terms. By age five I understood pain well enough not to have "needed" to think of pain as a cartoon monster. Children's ability to understand ideas like pain varies. I would guess that a child who didn't think of pain as a cartoon monster might still enjoy the "silly, babyish" quality of this story--know your students.
No comments:
Post a Comment