On Writing About Children

John Paul II, Kate DiCamillo, and the weight of personhood

This past year, I spent most of my time in the company of children. I was a full-time nanny for three months, for three children under the age of ten, and then spent Thursday afternoons with those same children for another five months. I tutored a seven-year-old girl all fall, which means that three days a week, I drank my morning coffee at her dining room table, while we talked about punctuation and Charlotte’s Web. It also meant that one day a week, I drove her and her siblings to a Charlotte Mason tutorial and then stayed to join their K-12 Morning Time and to help with the second and fourth grade classes. On the evenings when I needed adult company, I would drive just down the road to the house of a dear friend, my Downton Abbey and classic literature kindred spirit, and also the mother of four; I regularly babysat her kids and joined their pew on Sundays. In short: I spent a lot of time with kids, months of making mac-and-cheese in a crowded kitchen, inside jokes, Nerf gun fights, cicada catching, and talking about big ideas.

Here’s what I’ve learned from eight months where eighty percent of my time was spent with kids:

I like children a lot.

I dislike reading or writing about children.

Let me explain. I love children’s literature. I love Edward Eager and E. Nesbit; I love Children of the New Forest and Johnny Tremain and The Family Under the Bridge; I love the Katy books and the Shoe books and Narnia and Robert C. O Brien’s The Silver Crown. In fact, if a book has an eleven-year-old protagonist, I generally expect it to be more interesting than a good number of best-selling adult novels.

When I say I don’t like reading about children, what I mean is writing like this: “My child used to be so bad in church. She was loud and disruptive and unruly, and my spiritual life disintegrated. Then I started Doing These Things, and she was good, and now I can enjoy church. If you also Do These Things, your child will be good, and you too can enjoy church again.”

Or: “My child used to be so bad in church. She was loud and disruptive and unruly, and my spiritual life disintegrated. But that made me think about how we are all loud and disruptive and unruly before God—but He still loves us. Now I’m practicing loving my child like God loves us, and I’m also happy because I’m meditating on this beautiful thought.”

Or: “My child used to be so bad in church. She was loud and disruptive and unruly, and my spiritual life disintegrated. I got frustrated and snapped at her. Then I had to go apologize, and she forgave me and gave me a hug, and that reminded me that God is very forgiving and good. Isn’t my child wholesome and precious?”

I dislike reading this kind of stuff about children almost as much as I dislike my least favorite form of media that has ever existed, or exists, or will exist, which is people who obsessively film their children. Both recording and writing about children are two sides of the same coin: an adult mining a young person’s life for either moral lessons or likes.

I have very rarely written about the children I’ve known. I have, occasionally, and sometimes regretted it afterwards. But when I have, I’ve tried to write about them no differently than I would write about any of my friends: keeping details sparse, and trying to fill my words with as much dignity and affection as I can. But even then, I grow increasingly reluctant to write specifically about children at all, though I have some great stories I could share. It’s become another rule for me, in a list of writing principles—a sort of artist’s ethic.

I have a number of rules, including:

Never write out of anger. (An admonition taken from Virginia Woolf.)

Don’t write about ex-boyfriends.

When writing about family, try to run a version of events by relevant party.

When writing about anyone, try to practice what Cynthia Osick calls “envisioning the stranger’s heart”: to write about other people’s actions as if they were my own, giving them all the context and reasoning I would use to explain my own decisions.

And this newer one: don’t write about children in detail.

Why do I feel like I need all these rules? The best explanation I have is a story that Walter Wangerin Jr. shares in his book Beate Not the Poore Desk, which I read when I was fifteen, and which has shaped a lot of my thoughts on the writing life. In one of the chapters, he tells the story of a beautiful old house in a small town. A filmmaker comes to the owner of the house and asks if he can shoot a movie in her home. She agrees and moves out while filming commences, and the whole town goes around for several months excited and proud that this beautiful old home is going to be featured in a movie. When the owner and everyone else turns up for the special movie screening that has been arranged for the town, they find out that the director had been shooting a horror film, and in every scene, the rooms of this old house have been transformed into a locus of sicking evil. For years afterwards, when tourists visit the town, they come to see “the creepy old house from the movie”; meanwhile, neither the owner nor the other townspeople can walk past the house or enter any of its rooms without thinking of the movie and how the house had seemed on screen: as the home of something horrible.

Wangerin’s point is that artists must be responsible with their work. Writers must have an ethic, because writing about things—whether houses or people—changes how the world sees them. How would you like to be written about? Write like that.

Which brings us back to writing about children, and why I dislike so much of it. I would very much dislike if someone wrote about me the way many people write about children. If I was struggling to pay attention in church (which I often am), I would want a writer to note that it was because I was listening to the birds outside and watching the sunlight through the stained glass, that my legs had gotten restless because I knew it was so beautiful outside and I wanted to go run, that I was looking at the shapes in the rood screen, the vesica pisces and the three-pointed flourishes, and thinking about how to draw them the old way, with a compass and mathematical construction. I might want a writer to put that I wasn’t in the mood to talk to people after the service, because I’d had a frustrating morning, but was doing my best anyways.

A lot of writing about children isn’t like that at all; rather, it limits itself to talking about the behavior of children and the thoughts and emotions that those create for a parent. The reason for this, to the best of my understanding, is that parenting is difficult, and so parents do a lot of writing that’s intended to help others problem-solve or commiserate, that it’s often an act of empathy to another parent, a way of feeling less alone in this kind of work. It’s like teachers writing about their students, to help other teachers, or wives writing about their husbands, to relate to other married women, and so on.

But I take issue with that little preposition, “about”. It’s hard to write “about” anyone and not flatten them to fit into your personal story. We flatten other people all the time; we can’t help it. It’s hard to write about someone else as completely as we can write about ourselves, because we don’t experience their thoughts and feelings, we only experience our own reactions to what they do and say.

John Paul II called this “interiority”, this “living inside oneself” that we can never experience for someone else. We never fully get under someone else’s skin, the way we live our own lives—though there are ways of coming very close to it, through love. But John Paul II also says that we aren’t allowed to forget that everyone else possesses this interiority: that everyone else is living their lives in a complete context, and they have reasons for thinking and feeling and acting as they do. There are cases where it’s hard for some of us to communicate this interiority to others, or there are things that break into our thoughts and feelings that are untrue, or—as is especially true in the case of children—we have to learn how to make sense of both our interiority and the rest of the world, how to think clearly about all the pieces.

But the fact remains: everyone has their own inner life, which carries as much weight—what we might call “ontological weight”, the weight of one’s being-alive-ness—as yours or mine. This weight of interiority is what we call personhood. And personhood implies another rule, just like my writer’s ethic. John Paul II called this rule “the personalistic norm”, that is, the rule for how we should treat persons: “[The] person is the kind of good which does not admit of use…[and] a good towards which the only proper and adequate attitude is love.”¹ Everyone is living their own lives, with their own hopes and longing. The only proper way to treat them is to try and understand what their lives are like and to want good things for them, which is, of course, what it means to love. We aren’t allowed to flatten them into plot points in the oh-so-very-important story of our life. Nor are we allowed to misrepresent them out of anger or contempt. Doing so is like turning your neighbor’s home into a horror story.

What does this mean for writers? I think it must mean something like this: that insofar as we are able, we give up writing “about” people and instead try to write “for” people. Children are the easiest people to write “about” and the hardest to write “for.” It’s easy to write about “the distracted child in church” or “the loud child in class”—or even to write about “the heartwarming, angelic child and all the precious things she says.” But as one of my friends, a children’s librarian, has often pointed out, it’s much harder to write “for” kids, in part because they have a strong sense (as we all do) for when is writing “about” rather than “for.” A book “about” kids is a story about learning to share with your friends, or why bullying is wrong, or how nice it is to go to Grandma’s house. A book “for” children usually involves more dragons, and often they eat people.

Last month, I read Raymie Nightingale and Beverly, Right Here, the first and third books in a trilogy by Kate DiCamillo. DiCamillo is a genius at writing “for” children, rather than “about” them. She’s also a sort of Annie Dillard of children’s literature: she’ll introduce a phrase or image early in a novel, then return to it again and again, each time deepening its significance. Like this scene, from Beverly, Right Here, which is about a girl who runs away from home and ends up in a trailer park in Florida.

“Beverly sat on the curb and stared up at the big VFW sign.

There was a bird’s nest in the V. Sticks and grass were hanging out of the middle of it, and some small bird was going back and forth, adding things to the nest in a busy and important way.

Beverly thought about leaving. She had the keys to the car. She could take the Pontiac and go. She could become a proper criminal—a car thief. Iola probably wouldn’t even turn her in. She would just be sad and disappointed. Which was worse somehow.

So Beverly sat on the curb outside the VFW. She stared up at the sign. She watched the bird going back and forth.

And then the sign lit itself up. First, it made a humming and crackling noise, and then, one by one, the letters came to life.

V

F

W

Each letter was beautiful, and when Iola came out of the VFW, Beverly didn’t get up off the curb. She just kept staring at the sign.

…When she woke up in the morning, Nod was gone, and Beverly’s arms were sore from carrying the bucket full of dishes at Mr C’s. Her legs hurt, too.

She thought about the bird building the nest in the V at the VFW—flying back and forth and back and forth, and she thought about the lit-up letters, how beautiful they had seemed, how they had hummed in the darkness.

The smell of coffee wafted from the little kitchen.

Beverly lay on the wicker couch and looked at the gray light coming in through the louvres.

She felt as if something inside of her were humming, too.”

This is how I remember thinking about everything as a child. Everything mattered, everything happened in capital letters, as Important Moments, like Crossing the Green Bridge on our way to visit my grampa, or Exploring the Wilderness, the thorny greenbelt behind my childhood home in Texas, or Lighting the Candles for Advent in a dim kitchen. And Important Moments came in cycles—weekly, monthly, yearly—repeating and deepening in significance with each return.

DiCamillo writes about childhood from the inside out. I’ve read a lot of her books: Despereaux, Edward Tullane, Tiger Rising, Winn-Dixie, her Raymie Nightingale trilogy, and Ferris. Some I read as a child and others I only discovered as an adult, but in both cases, my experience was the same: I was drawn in, by the stories, and the plain, but powerful words, and sometimes by the sadness, for a number of her stories are sad. But I liked sad stories as a child, because I felt that the world was sad, as well as significant, which is something that people who only write “about” children forget: children don’t live in a different world than adults; they feel both its beauty and its brokenness; they’re living right alongside us. DiCamillo’s stories exist in a world “for” children, because they exist in a world for people, for all of us.

And they are stories about—though not “about”—people. DiCamillo’s books do a wonderful job of capturing the interiority of everyone. There are no caricatures in her novels, no people who are cartoonishly bad. Instead, there are characters like Roscuro, the rat who longs for light. Or Beverly, who Doesn’t Need Anybody, until she runs away from home and realizes how much she needs. Or Raymie’s father, who runs off with a dental hygienist and leaves his ten-year-old daughter behind—and yet whom we aren’t made to hate, as readers, only to miss, as Raymie does. There are unlikeable characters in DiCamillo’s novels: Botticelli the rat, Beverly’s mom, waitress Freddie’s boyfriend Jerome. But there are unlikeable people in real life. What DiCamillo never loses sight of is that even the people we don’t like are still fully people, with their own contexts and stories and inner worlds.

One of my favorite moments in Raymie Nightingale comes after Raymie has lost her book in the Golden Glen Happy Retirement Home, and she and Louisiana and Beverly must sneak back into the retirement home to retrieve it. But Raymie left her book in the room of Alice Nebbley, an older resident who scares Raymie because she won’t stop screaming: she keeps screaming that she’s in pain, that she needs someone to take her hand. But Beverly, who tries to act untouchably tough, marches into the room and takes Alice’s hand. She hums to her. And Alice stops screaming, and holds Beverly’s hand.

To acknowledge someone else’s personhood is just such an act. It’s a way of taking their hand. It’s love for the human, for God’s image, wherever we find it.

At the end of the day, most people who write “about” children—parents or teachers—do it because they’re trying to give advice, or because they need help. Our writing “about” people, which seems at times to stem from losing sight of someone’s interiority, is often such an attempt to figure out on paper how to relate to other imagebearers. And writing impersonally, only about your experience of your child and not your child’s experience, can be a way of protecting your children’s privacy, which is an act of honoring the person. Maybe literature is the only medium in which a writer can be impersonal and complete in their portrait of a person, and then only because he has the guise of fiction to hide behind. Meanwhile, so much writing “about” children involves neither care for their dignity by the exclusion of detail nor justice to their personhood by presenting things from their point of view.

Of course, I’ve ended up writing “about” children, in an unintentional, round about way. But I’ve been writing about myself too, about having been a child. And mostly, I’ve been writing about how we don’t get to decide who is or isn’t a person, and why we can’t forget that everyone has as much ontological weight, as much weight of being-alive-ness, as we do. What John Paul II and Kate DiCamillo would have us remember is that personhood is a deep and important thing. It requires something from us: a disposition to act “for” people. It requires us to be Beverly Tapinski, holding Alice Nebbley’s hand in a room in the Golden Glen Happy Retirement Center. This is also what it means to be a writer: it means loving people.

1. Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993),41