What are the hidden messages in the storybooks we read to our kids? That's a question that may occur to parents as their children dive into the new
What are the hidden messages in the storybooks we read to our kids?
That’s a question that may occur to parents as their children dive into the new books that arrived over the holidays.
And it’s a question that inspired a team of researchers to set up a study. Specifically, they wondered how the lessons varied from storybooks of one country to another.
For a taste of their findings, take a typical book in China: The Cat That Eats Letters.
Ostensibly it’s about a cat that has an appetite for sloppy letters — « written too large or too small, or if the letter is missing a stroke, » explains one of the researchers, psychologist Cecilia Cheung, a professor at University of California Riverside. « So the only way children can stop their letters from being eaten is to write really carefully and practice every day. »
But the underlying point is clear: « This is really instilling the idea of effort — that children have to learn to consistently practice in order to achieve a certain level, » says Cheung. And that idea, she says, is a core tenet of Chinese culture.
The book is one of dozens of storybooks from a list recommended by the education agencies of China, the United States and Mexico that Cheung and her collaborators analyzed for the study .
They created a list of « learning-related » values and checked to see how often the books promoted them. The values included setting a goal to achieve something difficult, putting in a lot effort to complete the task and generally viewing intelligence as a trait that can be acquired through hard work rather than a quality that you’re born with.
The results — published in the Journal of Cross Cultural Psychology: The storybooks from China stress those values about twice as frequently as the books from the U. S. and Mexico.
Take another typical example from China — The Foolish Old Man Who Removed The Mountain, which recounts a folktale about a man who is literally trying to remove a mountain that’s blocking the path from his village to the city.
