Should Children Read Books That Bring Up Difficult Feelings? By Julie M. Randolph Some parents worry that books about loss in adoption will evoke sad feelings that their child will not experience if they are not exposed to the book. This prompted me to step back and think about reading books in general, and the feelings we all (children included) have in response to them. One of the wonderful things about books is that by telling us a story about someone else, they help us recognize ourselves. I vividly remember reading Don Quixote as a teen-ager. The book tells a story that is all at once funny, sad and poignant. If you had asked me before I read it whether I had anything in common with this nutcase Spanish guy from the 17th century, I would have told you absolutely not. But by the time I was done with the book, he and Sancho Panza were near and dear to me. I was a young idealist who felt misunderstood and frustrated by my inability to right all the wrongs I saw around me. That book did not create those feelings in me, but did help me recognize the conflict I was having with myself and my parents about "idealism vs. reality." The book did not start me off to tilting at windmills, but it did show me the value of hanging onto a dream, no matter how nutty other people thought I was. I read many other books as a teen-ager, some of which I remember well, and many of which I don't remember at all. That book stands out these many years later, though, because reading about Don Quixote's life helped me understand something very important about my own. Many of the books that I have forgotten were also "classics", were well-written, and I'm sure spoke to other readers. Just not to me. It seems to me that one very good reason to read to a child is to open up to her a range of experiences and emotions that can be explored through the safety of the story. Sometimes the stories will help her see her own experience and sometimes they will give her insight into familiar feelings through lives that are very different from her own. A "sad" book does not create sadness in a child, but evokes a feeling that she already knows. If something in that sad book is familiar to the little girl reading it, it will resonate with her. She will learn that she isn't the only child who worries about, for example, the loss of a dear pet. If she could care less about lost dogs looking for home, the book won't speak to her. She'll have little interest in it. But if loss and abandonment are things that are important in her emotional life, she'll read that "sad" book again and again. And she will understand that she is not alone. Adoption stories are like all other books in that way. In asking whether they're "appropriate" for our children, we need to find out not whether they are "happy" or "sad" but whether they speak to the specific child reading or hearing them. As a parent reading to a child, it's probably most helpful to find out whether she sees a part of herself in the story, and to spend some time exploring with her why, or why not. Especially for children who we might call "sensitive," books can be a wonderful tool to show that powerful emotions can be hard to experience, but that we can move through them and be safe and sound at the end, maybe even stronger. Julie is an adoptive mom to two boys and a social worker with Pact.

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