As a group of leading child experts claim that children are sinking into depression as a result of the pace of modern life, we want to know which books you read as a child (and perhaps still revisit now) to escape the world and its pressures.
Back in the innocent 80s, Ferris Bueller, school-dodger extraordinaire, claimed "life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it". Today, child development professionals are not just concerned that kids are missing out on life, but that it's moving so darned fast that they are suffering depression and developmental conditions as a result. In a letter to the Telegraph, over 100 of the great and good in the field, including Baroness Susan Greenfield, Dr Penelope Leach and children's authors Philip Pullman, Jacqueline Wilson and Michael Morpurgo argue that the mental health of young people is being harmed by the pace of technological and cultural change. We have lost sight of children's emotional and social needs, say the writers of the letter: they need real food, real play and real time rather than processed fast food, electronic entertainment and a hyper-competitive education system. Oh, and, given that three of the most high profile names in contemporary children's fiction signed the letter, kids need real books too.
The Telegraph, in its leader, laments the loss of the simple, outdoor life of play (which even the spectacularly successful Dangerous Book for Boys has failed to revive, one suspects) but also sounds a note of caution. "Children of a certain age have always had a stroppy phase," warns the paper. It is important "that they learn early on that being occasionally miserable is an unavoidable part of adult life".
A "stroppy phase" and the clinical depression referred to by the letter's signatories are, of course, two entirely different things. However, regardless of whether books have a role to play in countering the menaces of modern life that are a factor in childhood depression, kid's books should always have a role as a comfort bufferzone from the world, a place in which to escape from real life and its patent unfairness.
My own childhood "stroppy phase" took place in an era before there were computers and Playstations in every eight-year-old's bedroom; there wasn't much else to do after stomping upstairs to my room than to lose my sulk in a book. Anything by Noel Streatfield usually did the trick. (The habit has stuck - even recently, a morning of grumpiness was cured with a quick rereading of Ballet Shoes, sulk forgotten almost before Pauline, Posy and Petrova had made their first birthday vow...) And then there was Willard Price and his adventures series (ooh, Hal and Roger...), and Ruby Ferguson's Jill pony stories...
They were my guaranteed strop-relievers - and yours? Which books cheered you up as a child (legitimately stroppy or not)? Any that you revisit today when the glums descend and you need a cottonwool wall between you and the world? Spill the beans...
