Talking to the Holy Spirit and Growling with the Bears

In this article I explore the construction of singing child characters in Isaac Watts’ Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1715) and Christopher Smart’s Hymns for the Amusement of Children (1771). The first part focusses on the nature of the lyrical persona within the lexical fields »voice and vocal sound« and »religion« and also looks at the possible addressees. The second part examines stylistic, phonetic, and formal elements, and explores their role in constructing the ›singing I.‹ To show the potential of Watts’ »Against Quarrelling and Fighting« to function as an invitation to playfully adopt behaviour opposed to Christian norms, the article examines a performance of Let Dogs Delight to Bark and Bite, a chorale by Matthew J. Zimnoch, whose text is taken from Watts’ hymn. Combining approaches from research on children’s poetry with ones from the interface of children’s literature and hymnody, the article also integrates a digitally supported close reading. The hymn texts were inputted into f4analyse, a software used in text linguistics and the social sciences, which allows for the assignment of categories, such as positive self-connotation of the ›singing I‹ or rhyme patterns. In conclusion, the article evaluates the potential of such a digitally supported research methodology for future research at the intersection of children’s literature and digital humanities.

Parenting Of Parents Work In Instilling Religious Attitudes And Respectful Attitudes In Adolescents

Parents, especially mothers are responsible for instilling the value of religious and social life in children, including adolescents through proper parenting. However, many parents choose to entrust the child completely to the school because it is busy with their work. This study aims to explain the parenting of working parents in instilling religious attitudes and respectful attitudes in adolescents, explain the factors that influence parenting, and explain the obstacles and solutions parents work in foster care. This study is a qualitative descriptive field study involving ten working parents. This research data is obtained through observation, interviews, and documentation. The results of this study found that the parenting used by sources is democratic parenting. Trust factors, comparison of parenting models, child gender, parental behavior, and character of children are factors that influence parenting in instilling religious attitudes and respectful attitudes in adolescents. In addition, there are obstacles in applying parenting, such as limited time together between parents and children because parents are busy working, child characters, mobile phones, child association, and social media. The solution in overcoming these obstacles is to be a good role model, make the best use of time to get to know the child's friendship environment, not only be a parent but can be a good friend and listener, and have to check the child’s phone.

Fear and wonderment in a limitless world: Learning to write from a child’s point of view

During my 25 years working as a screenwriter in Los Angeles, I developed a reputation as a writer who could craft vivid and believable scripts about young people. Initially, this was based on my teleplay for the first episode of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories series, and later for the semi-autobiographical Josh and S.A.M. released by Columbia Pictures. I also wrote uncredited revisions of DreamWorks’s Small Soldiers and Castle Rock’s Alaska, both involving prominent child characters. I have to confess that my reputation for writing content for children and adolescents realistically did not stem from any natural ability. It came from mining my personal childhood memories, and from studying movies and literature I felt authentically captured what it is like to be new in the world. This text explores my journey writing from a child’s perspective.

Children in the New Testament World

At the turn of the 20th century, Clarence Herbert Woolston penned the words to the now famous children’s song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (published in Gospel Message 1-2-3 Combined, edited by J. Lincoln Hall, Adam Geibel, and C. Austin Miles [Philadelphia: Hall-Mack Company, 1915], p. 355). Woolston’s song is reflective both of the American Sunday School movement of the 19th and 20th centuries and the growing trend in popular biblical studies to read Jesus as a friend of children. However, a few early monographs not excepting, children did not receive sustained attention in New Testament scholarship until the 21st century. This is distinct from studies and application of the metaphorical use of “children” and “child” as rhetorical or metaphorical images in New Testament texts, especially the Epistles, which is considered in a separate entry (“Child Metaphors in the New Testament,” forthcoming). With the advent of the interdisciplinary fields of childhood studies and child theology in the 1980s and 1990s, the stage was set to study more closely both Jesus’s relationship with children as portrayed in the New Testament texts and the child characters, Jesus included, therein. In terms of sheer demographics, children are estimated to have made up roughly two-thirds of ancient agrarian societies, such as the 1st-century Mediterranean. As such, when the feminist principle of reclaiming characters from the “shadows” of the text is employed, the imprint of children can be seen across the New Testament. This widespread presence of children in 1st-century Judea and Galilee has also been confirmed by social science and archaeological investigations. Moreover, such investigations have revealed that the character and nature of childhood, or more properly, childhoods in these contexts, was radically different than many of the 21st-century assumptions. Most notably, the assumptions that the Jesus movement was solely positive for children, or that such positivity was unique, have been called into question. To this end, the study of children in the New Testament seeks to bring to light both the presence and lives of child characters in these texts and the children among their original audiences while avoiding anachronistic and supercessionist assumptions. What has resulted is a more nuanced reading both of the experience and character of childhoods in the 1st-century world and, as a result, of the New Testament texts.

Critiquing Child characters as Heroes, Villains, and Victims in Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane

Social behaviour and filial background define the formation and development of a character that is bound by cultural influence in South Asian fiction. Ru Freeman weaves numerous characters and their stories in a single lane as a synecdoche of Sri Lankan history. On Sal Mal Lane (2014) showcases the different social groups defining Sri Lankan conflict in the 1980s with the presence of child characters who are unaware of the extent of the ethnic conflict swirling in the background of the narrative. This paper tries to define the concepts of heroes, villains, and victims through the socio-emotional development of the characters to determine the contradiction between their intentions and subsequent actions. The study uses Character Theory and elements of Affect Control Theory for critical analysis. The paper analyses the change in personality traits of child characters in response to the violence wrought by Sri Lankan ethnic prejudices and the extent of destructive development from the unstable familial and societal environments.

Lost Futures: Reading, Memory, and Repression

Children's novels sometimes allude to events in the lives of their protagonists after the end of the main narrative, either through the assertions of authoritative narrators or the speculations of child characters themselves. Such predictions offer a hostage to fortune, however, for history may take a different direction from that envisaged by the narrative. In such cases, readers must find a way to navigate the contradictions between fictional and actual histories. That navigation is always potentially problematic, but perhaps particularly so in the case of Golden Age fictions such as Peter and Wendy (1911) and The Story of the Amulet ( 1906 ), the child protagonists of which were the right age to have reached adulthood with the advent of the Great War. This article describes the strategies developed by later readers and writers to cope with the disjunction between historical and fictional futures.

An Unlikely Hero: Reconsidering Michael Endeʼs Momo as a Divine Child

The Divine Child was introduced by Carl Gustav Jung as an archetype closely linked to the process of individuation. Beyond the realm of analytical psychology, this peculiar child figure has been observed in myths and folklore and eventually evolved into a literary archetype known alternatively as das fremde Kind (the strange/alien child). Numerous child figures have since been regarded as representations of this archetype, with the titular character of Michael Ende’s novel Momo (1973) being one of them. While her initial appearance is evocative of the Divine Child, over the course of the story Momo has to accept her fate as the chosen one in a battle against a mysterious foe, ultimately finding herself in the role of the hero of the story. This paper examines the traits of both the archetype of the Divine Child, as well as that of the Hero – including a variation specific to child characters – with the goal of reconsidering if Momo is truly exemplary of the archetype of the Divine Child. This is done with particular regard to Christopher Vogler’s observation that literary archetypes are character functions, rather than fixed types, and as such this paper will discuss how Ende’s protagonist is ultimately an example of this fluidity of functions.

Mapping Child-Animal Care Relations in Shaun Tan’s Tales from Outer Suburbia

This article explores caring relations between child characters and sentient animals in two tales by Australian author-illustrator Shaun Tan. Each of Tan’s 15 Tales from Outer Suburbia are set in an “outer” suburban world replete with curious critters. These include a silent and stoic water buffalo, an unmoving dugong (manatee), and other surprising companion species. In this article, the author unpacks the caring relationships between child protagonists and the sentient creatures they encounter in two selected tales by focusing specifically on those processes that bring these characters together in curious encounters: that is, processes of embodied mapping. Emphasis is placed on enchantment and movement, and, in particular, moments given to pausing, lingering, and reflection. The author argues that both the fields of human-animal studies and the social studies of childhood can gain from exploration of the subtleties of these moments.

Tęsknota za ideałem. Rola dzieci w filmach i filozofii twórczej Andrieja Tarkowskiego

The topic of the article is the role of child characters in Andrei Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. The first part concerns the early films in which children appear as main characters and represent a spiritual ideal. In the second part, later films are analysed in terms of the presence of adult characters striving for this ideal.

Secrets, Stealth, and Survival

This article combines critical theory from children’s literature studies with research methods from games studies to explore the connection between silence and childhood in two digital texts. Little Nightmares (2017) and INSIDE (2016) are wordless video games that feature nameless, faceless children as their avatars. Weak and weaponless, the children must avoid detection and stay silent if they are to survive. By slinking and skulking, crouching and cowering, the children navigate their way through vast, brutal adult environments in order to reach safety – or so the player thinks. Both games, in fact, end in shocking, unexpected ways, prompting the disturbing realisation that silent children have secrets of their own. The games use scale, perspective, and sound to encourage close identification between the player and avatar, and position the silent, blank-faced child as a cipher onto which the player can project their own feelings of fear, dread, and vulnerability. The child-character’s quiet compliance with the player’s commands also situates the player as an anxious parent, orbiting, assisting, and protecting a dependent child as it moves through a dangerous world. For both subject positions, the child-character’s silence closes the distance between the player and avatar. However, when it is revealed that the child-characters have hidden, unknowable, and potentially sinister motivations, the meaning of their silence is wholly transformed. Using aetonormative theory (Nikolajeva; Beauvais; Gubar) in conjunction with studies of ideologies surrounding childhood (Jenks; Kincaid; Meyer; Balanzategui; Stockton; Lury), this article examines the extent to which these digital texts affirm or subvert cultural constructions of “the Child.” It employs a close reading approach proposed by games scholar Diane Carr to argue that the player-avatar relationships in these games shed new light on some of the fundamental contradictions that characterise adult normativity and child alterity, and concludes by suggesting some ways in which video games might productively expand and disrupt conceptions of aetonormative power relations.