Anna-Clara Tidholm

anna-Clara tidholm: one more time
Yes, books are outstanding. And of
course it is excellent reading books.
It is a truth, hard to questioning.
In our culture every child needs an
adjustment to the world of languages.
Children’s books are one
of the most important tools in that
schooling.
But in despite of my self working
with children’s books, I have
sometimes problems conforming
to the certainty of belief in reading
promotion. Librarians, teachers,
preschool persons – everybody are
doing a marvellous work, helping
those books we are producing
reaching the children. Without
their competence and work we
would be helpless drifting in the sea
of commerce. Where our sometimes
curious and not-so-cute
books would drown and sink (to
the bottom)!
Of course children need books –
but children need even more fairly
stable grownups, clean air, warm
clothes in winter and a lot of time
and room and possibilities and
freedom to play. Yes. Most of all
play- because play is the real core
of childhood, when it is allowed to
30
go on undisturbed and under the
protection of adults, mentally close
but on just sufficiently distance.
In playing are included all that we
put into the conception of culture,
play includes all the forms of art:
music, theatre, architecture, dance,
circus, art, language. But on children’s
own conditions and their
own chosen levels.
The critic of children’s books Magnus
William-Olsson, who every
year writes unpredictably surveys
in the newspaper Aftonbladet, was
in one of his texts surprised of the
absence of play in children’s books.
He did not mean descriptions of