Casual Friday: "Peter Pan" and the Riddle of Childhood

Hey Kaiser Editing followers, and welcome to my first Casual Friday video!
If you prefer text to video, scroll down to read my notes.

These videos will be different from my blog posts because they’ll be much more focused on my professional experiences, sharing my thoughts on things like digital content production and the mechanics of writing, as well as analysis of creative works. If this inspires you as a creator or a marketing professional, or in any other way, then great.

In a post earlier this week, I discussed Jay Baer’s ideas about taking a large piece of content and splitting it up into more bite-sized chunks—atomizing it for different platforms, occasions and audience.

That’s what these videos are going to be all about. Today, and perhaps quite often, I’ll use my teaching notes and other things I’ve worked on in the past to deliver my ideas.

Children’s literature is my favourite class to teach, partly because students often come in expecting it to be a breeze: how complicated can books for children be? But there’s a whole lot else going on in books written for children, often more than in books for grown ups.

I like to begin the course with a children’s story from the early 1800s so students can get a sense of how ideas about what children are like changes in time. Student often remark that the kids in this story are more like little adults than they are like children today, and this is true. But that’s how children were generally thought of at the time in the English-speaking world. It’s only in the 19th century, really, that childhood gets established as a period in life meant for fun, play, curiosity, fantasy and all the other things we associate with childhood.

A point I make is that children’s literature is a unique genre—it’s for children, and it often explores what it means to be a child, yet it’s written by adults. There is no way around it: the people who write for children are always, consciously or not, projecting their own personal and cultural ideas of what childhood means, at the same time contributing to constantly evolving cultural ideas about childhood.   

With the Harry Potter phenomenon, we’ve seen how our culture has come to embrace more and more, not so much the innocence, but the sense of play, discovery, and rapid growth associated with childhood, and we value more and more retaining these childlike qualities into adulthood.

Which brings me to Peter Pan (1911). That book is sometimes thought of as a lament at the loss of childhood, about wanting to never grow up. But the fact is, in the book at least, Peter is a sad, tragic figure.

On 118, we get the mystery of his existence:

 Sometimes, though not often, he had dreams, and they were more painful than the dreams of other boys. For hours he could not be separated from these dreams, though he wailed piteously in them. They had to do, I think, with the riddle of his existence. At such times it had been Wendy's custom to take him out of bed and sit with him on her lap, soothing him in dear ways of her own invention, and when he grew calmer to put him back to bed before he quite woke up, so that he should not know of the indignity to which she had subjected him.

 This is his existential despair at being a perpetual boy?

And Barrie anyway didn’t always think highly of children. At the very end, we read, “When Margaret grows up she will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.”

As early as 1911, J.M. Barrie was questioning the values we associate with children. Is innocence an ideal, or do we miss something of our humanity if we never grow up?

Even as he laid down a template for modern thinking about childhood, Barrie was subverting and questioning it. This depth is baked in to the whole story, though I don’t want to drag out this video for another hour, so I won’t get into it.

But if you’re an aspiring writer for children, it’s worth looking at how successful Peter Pan continues to be—not because it showcases the innocence and joy and beauty of childhood, but because it is sophisticated enough to question and to expose the dark sides of childhood in a book for and about them.