A Critical Analysis of the Dependent Child as Desirable in Children's Literature and Consequences on the Education and Childcare Sector

我的研究兴趣是探索儿童“依赖”成人的形象如何激励成人与儿童一起工作，并影响这项工作的进行。儿童文学为探索儿童与成人关系的结构如何在历史和文化上发生变化提供了一个完美的景观，并为探索“依赖”儿童概念的个体关系提供了材料。具体来说，我想探讨儿童依赖成人的图像是否会在成人读者，特别是教育工作者中产生安全感。本研究希望扩大在我的BA论文，探讨如何通过文本和家长的反应，在阅读环境中的文本，成人所需的儿童能指翻译给儿童进行的工作。我建议的研究方法包括进行跨文本和近文本分析，以评估儿童文学中的儿童形象作为“依赖”，通过客体关系的角度（例如爱丽丝米勒和唐纳德温尼科特）。这种分析可能包括儿童的图像，如依赖成人的人，动物，玩具和其他表征。从这里开始，我希望通过评估读者的反应来探索儿童依赖的可取性，因为教育工作者参与了一个说明依赖儿童的文本。我也对教育工作者如何策划班级图书馆以及在多大程度上（如果有的话）儿童作为依赖者的形象被优先考虑感兴趣

My research interest is to explore how images of children as 'dependent' on adults may motivate adults to work with children and influence how this work is conducted. Children's literature offers a perfect landscape for exploring how constructions of child-adult relations have shifted historically and culturally, as well as offering material to explore individual relationships with the concept of the 'dependent' child. Specifically, I wish to explore whether or not images of child dependency on adults produces a sense of security in adult readers and, in particular, educators. This research hopes to expand on work carried out during my BA Dissertation, which explored how an adult-desired child signifier is translated to children through the text and the parent's response to the text in the reading environment. My proposed research method involves conducting cross- and close- textual analysis to evaluate images of children as 'dependent' in children's literature through an object relation's perspective (e.g. Alice Miller and Donald Winnicott). This analysis may include images of children as dependent on adults as humans, animals, toys and other characterizations. From here, I wish to explore the desirability of children-as-dependent by evaluating reader response as educators engage with a text that illustrates a dependent child. I am also interested in how educators curate class libraries and the extent to which (if at all) images of children as dependent are given preference