Children's Books for Special Needs: Growing Up
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Author
Barnardos
Fingal County Libraries
Date
2000
Citation
Barnardos & Fingal County Libraries. (2000). Children's Books for Special Needs: Growing Up. https://knowledge.barnardos.ie/handle/20.500.13085/820
Abstract
Growing up is about important things like princesses and goblins. It’s about best friends that you have ferocious fights with and making up and being inseparable all over again. It’s about being afraid of the dark but wanting to camp out in the garden. It’s about all those ‘life and death’ issues with questions needing specific answers like "Where do babies come from?" and "How did they know how to get here?" Environmental dilemmas pondering "Where does the moon go in the morning?" need explanation while seemingly unanswerable questions like "Why do grannies have hair on their chin?" test our creativity. Growing up is a time when children are like sponges, soaking up information through all their senses. It’s happening so fast that sometimes they don’t have the language to question things that puzzle them and even if they have the language, the amount they are experiencing is so vast that they haven’t time to even formulate questions. But all the time they have fears and hopes and dreams and loves and hates all mixed up together. They sometimes cry when we think they should be happy and they scream when we think they should be calm, and sometimes they even feel lonely or frightened when they are surrounded by people who love them. Often they don’t have words for these feelings, so they feel their emotions in their ‘tummies’ or in their ‘heads’. So when they complain of having a ‘sore tummy’ or say things like "I’ve a pain in my mind", perhaps it’s not a physical pain but instead the place where they feel their feelings and want reassurance that things are going to be OK.