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Children's Literature in Education

, Volume 46, Issue 2, pp 175–189 | Cite as

The “Mother” of All Schemas: Creating Cognitive Dissonance in Children’s Fantasy Literature Using the Mother Figure

  • Einat Natalie Palkovich
Original Paper
First Online:

Abstract

Mothers are essential facilitators of early Theory of Mind development and intrinsic to the acquisition, as well as the content, of many basic schemas learnt in infancy. In this article it is argued that the mother schema in children’s literature can ease a child’s transition into literary discourse by exploiting the child’s secure base schema. Furthermore, by generating a sense of felt security in the reading event, the benevolent mother becomes an inherent part of the child’s broader reading schema. Two texts are examined in this article in which the good mother’s familiarity is undermined through the introduction of elements traditionally associated with the bad mother figure. Using Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic, it is argued that the modification of the mother schema can serve as a way to introduce the reader to new genres and themes; however, significant dissonance is generated in the child’s reading schema in instances where the good/bad mother dichotomy is not restored by the end of the narrative.

Keywords

Schema Children’s Literature Fantasy Dissonance Scripts Good Mother Bad Mother Secure base schema 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.NYU ShanghaiShanghaiChina

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