Children’s literature: What’s in a magazine for children?
“We should not bind children to fairy tales. It is important to educate them about their environment and make them able to solve their problems by understanding ground realities,” Nadeem Hassan from the Children Complaint Office (CCO) said.
Hassan was addressing a seminar arranged by the CCO ombudsman in collaboration with the UNICEF Punjab on Awareness on Child Rights through Children Magazines.
Hassan said that parents need to change the way they bring up their children. There was dire need update and modernise children literature for children.
He made a presentation about children literature in Punjab.
“There are 14 journals for 40 million children in the Punjab,” he said.
Shamshad Qureshi, a child protection specialist at UNICEF Pakistan said that children who were illiterate should be conveyed messages through visual and performing arts. “Television, theatre, music, advertisement, posters and radio can play an important role in creating awareness,” he said.
He said there were around 50 journals for children in Pakistan. “In any developed country, the number is above 150,000,” he added. These journals should address child labour, drugs, physical and sexual abuse and exploitation by parents, relatives, friends and strangers.
Dr Fauzia Tabassum, regretted that there was a lack of sponsors for events for children.
She said she had stopped arranging the Tot Batot festival around Sufi Tabassum’s works for the same reason. Dr Tabassum has written two books for children and was awarded by the National Book Foundation, but no publisher was ready to publish the books. “They think that publishing such stuff will not be profitable.”
She said the publisher had paid her just Rs2,500 as royalty for her grandfather’s bestseller Urdu poems Jhoolnay. She also complained about getting Rs30,000 for a cassette recording of children’s poems that, she said, cost Rs100,000 to produce.
The seminar aimed at discussing the role of children magazines in spreading awareness among them about their rights. It was attended by writers and child rights activists.
Published in The Express Tribune, July 1st, 2011.
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This is true. We need more fairy tales for children to read. As a child, I read Enid Blyton books avidly, but the majority of children in Pakistan cannot read English nor can they afford to buy such expensive books. I also agree that using other forms of media will also benefit the children and will be easier to make available to them,