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Who does the nurturing work in children’s books?
“Mothers in the books were more likely than fathers to perform almost every nurturing behaviour, including verbal and physical expressions of love, encouraging, praising and listening,” the researchers write. Similarly, mothers outperformed fathers on every care-giving behaviour. Gender stereotypes plague children’s picture books, from Salon Mothers often appear at the beginnings of hero tales. They preside over the home which…
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Skeuomorphism In Picture Books
Skeuomorphism is a word from the world of graphical user interface design. It describes interface objects which mimic real-world counterparts in how they appear and/or how the user can interact with them. I’m starting to hear it outside tech blogs: Has Morality Become A Skeuomorph? from The Society Pages. Skeuomorphism is also useful when talking about picture books, especially picture book apps,…
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What makes a picturebook re-readable?
“We’re not trying to make stories that are going to be read, we’re trying to make stories that are going to be read a milliondy billiondy times.” Mo Willems While children’s books need to be re-readable, books aimed at an adult audience do not: As anyone who has ever read books to a child knows, young children frequently want to hear…
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Stock Yuck In Picturebooks
Children don’t tend to like green vegetables. Picture book creators know this, and often, greens are used as proxy for any yucky thing: Stock yuck.
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Nudity In Picturebooks
This morning Cosmopolitan reports that UK authors are pushing for children’s literature to include sex in fiction for kids. That’s quite a headline grabber. Of course, reading the actual article offers a less sensationalist request: They’re not asking too much, are they? Bear in mind that in the publishing world, ‘children’s literature’ includes the young adult category. I wish them…
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Touch Interactivity And Animation In Storybook Apps
App developers would do well to remember that when it comes to providing a reading experience that is developmentally valuable for young children, it’s as much down to what the app doesn’t do, as what it does. a commenter on the Guardian article: Alarm Bells and Whistles Many of the first digital picturebook apps (‘storyapps’ for short) produced for the…
