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

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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