“What is the moral of the story?”
Do you ask your child this question and answer it yourself?
Most of the time, we rely on stories to teach our children important values in life. Some books tend to get too preachy while some have a knack of slipping in the message subtly. In cases where the message is subtle, we tend to think that the child will not understand and needs to be explicitly told.
As a children’s book author creating Custom Picture Books, I like writing stories that are fun to read. My focus is always to make reading a pleasurable activity and not one that always must end with some lesson being learnt. I believe it is important to enjoy a story because there is something in it that helps strike a chord with the child’s interests and not because he or she must learn a value or some lesson. Yes, books are a great way to teach children important things, but that in no way should be the ultimate goal, in my opinion.
So I don’t write with a specific moral in mind. As a result I don’t expect a reader to find a moral. One reader, a child took me by surprise however. My mother gave him one of my books as a birthday present. The book is about a fire engine and a giraffe who become good friends. The giraffe wants to be a firefighter like the fire engine. After the book was read to him he asked his mother what the moral of the story is. It appears that that’s something that is always discussed after a book is read and hence the question. Of course there is no intended moral as such and so the mother did not find it. So when the child posed the question, the mother directed the question back to him, not really giving it a thought. The child replied “The moral of the story is that one must be kind to one’s friends.”
Children have the most unexpected perceptions of stories that in many ways are bound to make you wonder where and when you lost all that keen sense of perception. They have a knack of identifying emotions and judging if those emotions are good or bad. It seems like they have some sort of sixth sense.
“Children have the most unexpected perceptions of stories that in many ways are bound to make you wonder where and when you lost all that keen sense of perception.”
Recently a story of mine- Gift for a princess was published in The Hindu Young World. The story is about a princess who wanted an elephant as a pet. When I wrote the story the focus was first on the elephant and then on the princess. The mahout (The man who takes care of the elephant) was just another character in my mind. A friend’s daughter had this to say after the story was read to her. “I liked the Mahout the best as he is very kind to the elephant.”
When I wrote that story I did not consciously add that “kindness” element. I was surprised how the child picked on that emotion that was shown in the story. These two children whose feedback means a lot to an author like me, made me realise that they have so much going on in their young minds. Maybe they don’t express it most of the time, but one must never underestimate what they see, perceive and understand. Given a chance, they can change the way you perceive things in the real world.
