Why Kids Love Being Scared, According to a Famous Children ’s Author

Sandra Boynton, the creator of an empire built on whimsical greeting cards (by some estimates she has sold more than 500 million) and board books, has in more recent years branched out into kids music. She specializes in the type that doesn’t want to make parents shoot their sound systems, and that often features singers that parents are already fans of, including Meryl Streep and Kevin Bacon. Her most recent album Hog Wild!, for example, features Samuel L. Jackson as a Tyrannosaurus Rex. (A video of the song with Boynton’s iconic drawings is above.) All the artists’ and Boynton’s royalties go to Paul Newman’s Hole in the Wall Gang Camp. She talked with TIME about how to tap into kids’ imaginations and how to make thing scary things less threatening for them. In your years of writing and illustrating children’s books, have you noticed anything that really sparks a child’s imagination? I think maybe there’s no basic difference between what captivates a child and what captivates the rest of us. We’re all drawn to things that wake us up, things that grab our attention through our hearing or our sight or our sense of touch. We’re curious about the world as it is, and we’re curious about what could be. Imagination follows curiosity pretty naturally. It doesn’t feel to me like it’s been a long time that I’ve been drawing and writing things. It doesn’t feel like a short time, either. It ...
Source: TIME.com: Top Science and Health Stories - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Children imagination kid's books Music Parenting video Source Type: news