Geetanjali Krishna: The healing power of books

Some time ago, I was chatting with a three-year-old who declared she wanted to grow up to be a “policeman” who “killed terrorists”. When I asked why, her mother said that the child was deeply affected by the images she saw on the news these days. The only way in which she was able to express her fears was through pretend games with guns. “It is so difficult to get her to actually talk about what’s really bothering her,” she said. Another five-year-old disrupted a holiday to Sri Lanka by getting panic attacks anytime he or his family went near the sea. He was afraid that a tsunami would engulf them all.

“Young children today are growing up in an increasingly troubled world, and they’re struggling to make sense of it,” said Ira Saxena of the Association of Writers and Illustrators for Children (AWIC). After the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, the AWIC has been working on a pioneering Book Therapy project with school children. While chatting with the students, they discovered that children as young as five were extremely confused about the violence they saw in their daily lives as well as on their TV sets. “One child said he wanted to shoot terrorists, and another child reasoned that if we didn’t retaliate against them, terrorists would kill us all,” said Saxena. Some of the children couldn’t be coaxed to talk at all, while others spent their time drawing violent pictures. AWIC members found that reading stories and looking at picture books with the children offered a way of making them understand complex ideas easily. “Also, some books we read had many concepts that children could discuss in the group,” she said . Hence the idea that the very act of reading could be therapeutic for troubled children.

Essentially, Book Therapy entails reading appropriate books along with children and centring discussions around them. This gives children a platform to express thoughts and ideas that they may not otherwise be able to easily talk about. In fact, reading books together helps kids to just talk, an important part of the healing process. Saxena recollected an incident that occurred when she was a teacher in the UK, involving a girl she was unable to connect with. “The child was very reserved, and getting past her barriers was tough,” she recalled. One day, while looking at a book with pictures of water lilies, the child said that there were water lilies near the churchyard where her grandmother was buried. “This simple comment helped the child, traumatised by her grandmother’s death, to open up to us,” said she.

“We find that the right books can also enable a child to understand his or her own situation,” said Saxena. I wondered about the types of books best suited for this therapy. “With children up to the ages of ten, picture books work well. Often, a child’s mind registers colours and images more easily than it does the written word,” she explained. AWIC sees Indian folk tales and Panchtantra stories as having great potential for book therapy. “Indian children are familiar with them and they’re easy to understand,” said Saxena. That’s why AWIC is currently compiling a catalogue of Indian books suitable for book therapy. Also on the anvil is an international Book Therapy conference slated for 2012.

After chatting with Saxena, I switched between news channels trying to see them from a child’s perspective. The recent Dhaula Kuan rape case was top news, and losing myself in the pages of my favourite bedside book seemed much saner. And that’s what I did. Therapeutic or not, books are certainly the best escape route I know!