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年人与儿童一起工作，并影响这项工作的开展方式。儿童文学为探索儿童-成人关系的构建如何在历史和文化上发生变化提供了一个完美的景观，也为探索具有“依赖”儿童概念的个人关系提供了材料。具体来说，我希望探究儿童依赖成人的形象是否会给成年读者，尤其是教育工作者带来安全感。本研究希望扩展我在学士学位论文中开展的工作，该论文探讨了成人期望的儿童能指如何通过文本和父母在阅读环境中对文本的反应翻译给儿童。我提出的研究方法包括通过对象关系的角度（例如Alice Miller和Donald Winnicott）进行交叉和密切的文本分析，以评估儿童文学中“依赖”的儿童形象。这种分析可能包括儿童像人类、动物、玩具和其他特征一样依赖成年人的图像。从这里开始，我希望通过评估读者在教育工作者参与描述依赖儿童的文本时的反应来探索儿童依赖的可取性。我还对教育工作者如何管理班级图书馆，以及在多大程度上（如果有的话）把孩子描绘成依赖者的形象给予偏爱感兴趣

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