Why mental health books are important in children’s publishing.
‘Last year the children’s non-fiction market, excluding study guides, grew by 10.4% to £49.9m’ and the industry could again achieve growth in 2019 according to The Bookseller (Eyre, 2019). One of the reasons for this growth is the rise of mental health books for children and it is important to understand why this is.
With the exposure to social media and the collapse of the watershed, children are ultimately growing up faster and thus, being introduced to mental health terminology from an early age that may seem confusing to them. I, as a child, didn’t blink an eye at the words ‘depression’, ‘anxiety’ or ‘bipolar’ because they weren’t spoken about as frequently, which left me not knowing what these words truly meant. Today, with the topic of mental health less stigmatised, children deserve to have the necessary tools to educate them.
Matt Haig, a successful author of mental health books, believes that ‘constantly reassuring children that everything is fine is short-sighted because it doesn’t help them to develop coping strategies and mental health resilience’ (Ferguson, 2018). Similar to this, The Guardian reinforces the idea that ‘by mollycoddling our children, we’re fueling mental illness in teenagers’(Haidt and Paresky, 2019). Does this suggest that children today are still being forced to shelter away from any adult themes? Isn’t the shock of entering into adulthood without this knowledge a lot more damaging than learning about the stresses and strains of daily life from an early age? By producing books about mental health, this is not causing children to stop having a childhood, but it is, in fact, normalising something that does not need to be stigmatised anymore and preparing children for the future and changes that we are facing in society.
Haig, however, argues that non-fiction may not be the most successful way to achieve this, ‘he started to write a nonfiction self-help book about mental health for children, but ended up feeling he was patronising his readers’ (Ferguson, 2018). This suggests that fiction books may be better at subtly presenting the information to children or alternatively, non-fiction books should aim to provide the necessary facts in an informative yet exciting way. For example, Usborne’s ‘let’s talk about mental health’ book successfully engages children with its accessible guides and practical advice through the use of carefully placed illustrations and throughout the tone of the book.
Whichever way mental health is being presented to children, whether this is through a practical non-fiction guide or a fictional story, it is essential that children are exposed to this information and we should continue to normalise this subject, the same way that physical health is presented in today’s society. It is important to understand that children are going to continue to be curious about mental health and this curiosity needs to be fuelled.
Eyre, C. (2019) Children’s publishers predict significant rise in popularity of non-fiction titles, Thebookseller.com. The Bookseller. Available at: https://www.thebookseller.com/news/children-s-publishers-predict-significant-rise-popularity-non-fiction-titles-937601 (Accessed: February 10, 2019).
Ferguson, D. (2018) Can picture books meet the crisis in children’s mental health?, the Guardian. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/oct/18/can-picture-books-meet-the-crisis-in-childrens-mental-health (Accessed: February 10, 2019).
Haidt, J. and Paresky, P. (2019) By mollycoddling our children, we’re fuelling mental illness in teenagers | Jonathan Haidt and Pamela Paresky, the Guardian. The Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jan/10/by-mollycoddling-our-children-were-fuelling-mental-illness-in-teenagers (Accessed: February 10, 2019).
