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The Family in Children's Literature and Its Disintegration

The education of children is one of the most important parts in children's literature. Children's literature, whose implied readers are both children and parents, is a good means to teach how they should behave and interact. Therefore, literary conventions of children's literature tend to be conservative with happy endings or fairy tale elements. Most of the children's literature of the 18th century were read as a conduct book which teaches children good manners and proper behavior, and at the same time served as a guidebook which tells parents how to discipline children. It emphasized the need of discipline to ascertain the hierarchy and order of the family, and cherished the close relationship between parents and children. In the 19th century, the ideal of family becomes more internalized. In the early 20th century, the ideology of family still remained, even though the world wars and economic depressions caused the cracks and collapses of the family. In the later 20th century, the disintegration of the traditional family was accelerated. The ideal of family based on the close relationship between parents and children, has had problems from the start. The attachment and over-closeness became stressful and sometimes could be poisonous. Recent children's literature shows the process of disintegration of the traditional nuclear family, children suffering in the fractured family, children's mental trauma, and nostalgia for the lost family. However, modern children's literature manages to find the lost or ideal surrogate family, and often shows fairy-tale elements such as mystical and heroic child protagonists or helpers who might solve all the difficult problems at once, despite the collapse of the family in reality.