Make Believe Quotes

“When children cannot find their experience and emotions – even (and especially) their fears, jealousy, sadness, and anger – reflected in the stories they read, two things can happen, both bad.
Kids may abandon reading and seek out art and media that better reflects their lives. Or, instead of deciding that there must be something wrong with books, children may decide that there must be something wrong with themselves, and become ashamed of the very human feeling, which adults have excluded from their literature.”
― Mac Barnett, Make Believe

“Kids are human beings right now, with rich interior lives. They deserve entertaining stories and meaningful art.”
― Mac Barnett, Make Believe

“A lot of children's books published are propaganda for adulthood. They're prosocial messages masquerading as stories, designed to promote good behavior, glorifying grown-ups, and get kids to sleep on time. These books get praised for their educational value or positive moral messages, but they fail to provide any kind of real literacy experience for children. Instead their value is to the adults who buy them and who find themselves flattered, and their rules reinforced, in the books' pages.”
― Mac Barnett, Make Believe

“When my son was about to turn two, strangers would offer condolences. There’s a collective cultural dread of toddlers, who get described more like animals than people. Kids in their "terrible twos," I was warned, are illogical, unregulated, and feral. "Good luck," people would say. "He'll grow out of it."

I'm lucky: My son is a very easygoing kid. But I remember the first tantrum he threw for me. He was standing by our front door and asked to go outside. So I opened the door and grabbed his shoes. But as soon as he stepped onto the porch, he pointed back into the house.

"Inside," he said.

"Okay," I said. I picked him up and brought him inside.

But as soon as I shut the front door, he pointed outside.

"Outside!" he said.

You know where this is going. We went back and forth, inside and outside, again and again. He got more frustrated. And I got more frustrated. Eventually he wound up straddling the threshold of our house, sobbing. When I tried to comfort him, he screamed at me. "You go wherever you want!" I said. He just got madder. I felt trapped, convinced he’d concocted the whole episode as a pretext to unleash his rage at me. It was ridiculous. I consoled myself with the thought that he was just being a toddler.

But later I kept thinking about him wailing at our front door, one foot inside, one foot outside. His misery wasn't unreasonable, or trivial, or silly. My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time. What a fundamentally human sorrow! My son wasn't being a toddler; he was being a person. Adults may not walk around howling, but that same pain rages within us. In that moment, as a father, I was powerless to solve my son's problem. I told him he could go wherever he wanted, but of course I was wrong. To be where he wanted was impossible.”
― Mac Barnett, Make Believe