Margaret Wise Brown on seeing as children see

Using her own childlike senses

The author of the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon, which has sold at least 48 million copies since it appeared in 1947, Margaret Wise Brown had trained in the experimental educational school in Greenwich Village called Bank Street. Under the founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, she learned to write fro the point of view of a child. This description of Brown’s way of seeing world is taken from “The Surprising Ingenuity Behind ‘Goodnight Moon’” in The Smithsonian.

While the book’s [Goodnight Moon’s] relationship to reality may be slightly askew, it also feels true to childhood, a period when, as Brown was quick to note, the world adults take for granted seems every bit as strange as a fairy story, and the pleasure of language lies less in what it communicates than in its sound and rhythm. . . .

At the time, children’s literature still consisted largely of fairy tales and fables. Sprague, basing her ideas on the relatively new science of psychology and on observations of how children themselves told stories, believed that preschoolers were primarily interested in their own small worlds, and that fantasy actually confused and alienated them.

“It is only the blind eye of the adult that finds the familiar uninteresting,” Mitchell wrote. “The attempt to amuse children by presenting them with the strange, the bizarre, the unreal, is the unhappy result of this adult blindness.”

Under Sprague’s mentorship, Brown wrote about the familiar — animals, vehicles, bedtime rituals, the sounds of city and country — testing her stories on classrooms of young children. It was important not to talk down to them, she realized, and yet still to speak to them in their own language.

That would mean summoning her own keen, childlike senses to observe the world as a child does—which is how one chilly November she found herself spending the night in a friend’s barn, listening to the rumbling of cows’ bellies and the purring of farm cats. . . .

As she matured, her stories grew past the simple “Here-and-Now” she had learned under Sprague, becoming more dreamlike and evocative. “The first great wonder at the world is big in me,” she wrote to Strange. “That is the real reason that I write.”

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