SEE: peer pressure
clinginess
SEE: confidence, lack of • grow up, not wanting to
clumsiness
All kids start out clumsy – just watch a three-year-old trying to pour milk on their breakfast cereal if you’re in any doubt. Clifford, the big red dog, is clumsy too in a wet-nosed, incompetent way which stems partly from his being the size of a house, and partly from an over-abundance of zeal. A kind and affable creature with big, cartoony eyes, Clifford never means to make a mess. But when he digs a hole, he can’t help uprooting an entire tree. And when he chases a car, he can’t help coming back with the whole vehicle clamped between his jaws. The fact that Clifford’s owner Emily Elizabeth loves her pet however inadvertently destructive he is,7 is what makes these books reassuring as well as fun.
For older readers who still can’t seem to look where they’re going, Matthias, the young mouse-hero of Redwall – the first of an engrossing, twenty-two-book-long series about the inhabitants of an ancient abbey – is forever doing clumsy things when we first meet him. Flip-flopping around in sandals that are too big for him, he trips over his words as well as his feet: ‘Er, sorry, Father Abbot . . . Trod on my Abbot, Father Habit.’ The Abbot can see that this bungling young mouse has something special about him – and when the mice and their faithful badger Constance have to defend themselves against the evil one-eyed rat, Cluny the Scourge, and his army of vermin, it is Matthias the mice look to for leadership. Matthias’s clumsiness hasn’t left him by the end of this story: he still manages to go sprawling over a tree root when rushing back for his final showdown with Cluny. But by then it’s a sign of his eagerness to do battle, too. Youngsters who suffer from this ailment might take note of the Abbot’s advice and move through life a little more slowly. Or they can notice how endearing Matthias’s clumsiness makes him and embrace theirs, too.
SEE ALSO: adolescence • lose things, tendency to
cold, having a
SEE: adventure, needing an • cheering up, needing
coming out
SEE: gay, not sure if you are
concentrate, inability to
SEE: fidgety to read, being too • short attention span
confidence, lack of
Whether they’ve been overshadowed, undermined, ground down by criticism – or never seemed to have any in the first place – children suffering from a lack of confidence need an exhilarating metaphor that helps them break free, and the encouragement to believe in themselves. They’ll find both in Tar Beach, a story inspired by the author’s memories of lying on the roof of her family’s apartment in Harlem on hot summer nights.
While her parents play cards with the neighbours, eight-year-old Cassie Louise Lightfoot rises up into the sky. The only witness to the girl’s magical flight is her baby brother, Be Be, ‘lying real still on the mattress, just like I told him to’. The simple, bold illustrations, reminiscent of Chagall, draw us into Cassie’s imagination as she soars over the George Washington Bridge, beyond the skyscrapers and up to the stars. Up here, she feels like everything she can see belongs to her – including the new Union building, which her father is helping to build but can’t belong to because he’s ‘colored, or a half-breed Indian, like they say’ – and in a way it does. Along the bottom of each page we see the stitched-together squares of the original quilt made to tell this story, a craft handed down to Ringgold from her southern ancestors.
With its legacy of slavery and discrimination, the metaphor of flying from one’s constraints packs a mighty punch. Cassie tells Be Be that he can do it, too – but first he has to want to go somewhere: ‘I have told him it’s very easy, anyone can fly. All you need is somewhere to go that you can’t get to any other way.’ Encourage an unconfident child to imagine doing whatever it is they wish they could do. Believing they can do it is the first step. Once they believe that they can, they will.
SEE ALSO: body image
constipation
There’s something immediately appealing about comic strips, with their eye-catchingly large faces, speech bubbles, undemanding storylines and private asides shared with the reader. Keep a stack of them in the loo for occupying sluggish moments.
THE TEN BEST COMIC-STRIP BOOKS TO KEEP IN THE LOO
SEE ALSO: tummy ache
contrary, being
As perfectly proportioned for little hands as this book is – one of the four books in Sendak’s diminutive Nutshell Library box set9 – so is its impact perfectly disproportional. ‘I don’t care!’ says Pierre to everything his parents say until they decide, understandably enough, that they’ve had enough of this contrary little boy and go to town without him. So when a lion comes along and wonders how Pierre would feel about being eaten, and gets the same response, no one is there to protect him.10 We’re not suggesting that children will be convinced by the moral of this cautionary tale and never utter the words ‘I don’t care’ again,11 but it may convince those on the small side that if they want to make an impact disproportionate to their size, the best way to do so is not by being