Means to a ‘Happily Ever After’?: How Children’s Literature Might Inform Global Migration Policy

A phenomenon as old as history itself (Castelli 2018, 2), migration garners undoubted attention with as many as 281 million international migrants today (UNICEF 2021). Yet, such attention treats this demographic precisely as such: a faceless, monolithic group reshaping a contentious world order. However, the lives of 28 million migrant children dealing with their various situations, ranging from fleeing conflict to seeking education or employment, change this picture (Ensor & Goździak 2010, 1). Yet, victim narratives and ambiguous conceptualizations of children’s maturity persist, entrenching the global and political disregard of children as actors with first-hand migrant experiences. In challenging this normative precedent, Watson argues children are valuable “sites of knowledge,” capable of informing contemporary global migration policies (Watson 2006, 24). This article focuses on the potential children’s literature and storytelling have on enacting policy change and argues they should be regarded seriously by policymakers, academics, and the public alike.

Indeed, children’s book authors have known the intergenerational benefits of reading children’s literature for some time. W.H. Auden argues that while “there are good books which are only for adults because their comprehension presupposes adult experiences… there are no good books which are only for children” (qtd. in Rundell 2023). Elodie Razy, amongst other anthropologists, echoes these thoughts: children’s fiction places readers into children’s subjectivities (Razy et al., 24). This allows them to play a central, informative role in the politics and identities of adult institutions across other social categories such as gender, race, and class (Razy et al., 24). Yet, although academic acknowledgements of intergenerational educational benefits are important, it is arguably their political recognition, which is the most significant and recent development. 

Save the Children Norway’s A Kit of Tools for Participatory Research and Evaluation with Children, Young People and Adults refers specifically to global peacebuilding efforts but applies to other contemporary affairs. More specifically, its finding that children’s storytelling reaps educational and developmental benefits for participating children, youth, and adults (Save the Children Norway 2008) significantly legitimizes children’s informative perspective on policymaking and adult knowledge. Indeed, despite storytelling’s ancient, cross-cultural roots, regard for children’s storytelling remains culturally specific where many non-Western traditions have viewed children’s perspectives as instructive to adult leadership and institutions for centuries. This includes the Acholi (a northern Ugandan tribe) storytelling tradition of “Wang Oo” which encourages both elders and children to share proverbs and stories around a fire (Save the Children Norway 2008; “Wang Oo”). Such traditions challenge the generally Western treatment of children’s reading and education as a linear process, whereby children’s education matures and levels up towards adult knowledge (Rundell, 2023), by believing elders have just as much to learn from children. Yet, if various cultures, academic paradigms, and even global policies take stock of children’s literature and storytelling as informative to how we perceive the world, where does this sit regarding global migration policy?

Despite children’s migration literature being an available resource for some time now, migration policy has yet to reach a practical stage in considering children’s perspectives. Coker contends themes of migration in Kenyan children’s fiction became more visible in the twenty-first century but can also be found shortly before and after twentieth-century independence (Coker 2016, 191-3). Thus, despite its established existence as a genre and reconceptualization of the migrant experience as encompassing various young and old subjectivities, children’s migration literature remains ignored in the political sphere of migration policy. However, this picture is not entirely bleak. Children’s literature and storytelling inform migration policy practices largely in discreet, informal ways. Danticat (2015), for example, recounts the political impact she made as a child writing to local newspaper reporters in hopes of repealing her mother’s detainment in Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation: “I take Papa’s advice, sit down, and write my own story… In a week’s time, because of all the phone calls and the letters to the prison from people who read about us in the newspaper and saw us on TV, Mama is brought before a judge… The judge says Mama can come home”. 

Both Danticat’s narration and – most importantly – her storytelling as a child tell of the direct, political impact children’s literature and storytelling can have on the operations of global migration policies. Its impact should no longer be only recognized by its readership. Children’s storytelling is an available site of knowledge for policymakers to develop more humane, inclusive, and socially beneficial migration policies.

Sources

Castelli, Francesco. “Drivers of Migration: Why Do People Move?” Journal of Travel Medicine  25, no. 1 (1 Jan. 2018): p. 1-7. https://doi.org/10.1093/jtm/tay040. 

Coker, Oluwole. “Child Narration as a Device for Negotiating Space & Identity Formation in Recent Nigerian Migrant Fiction.” Chapter. In Children on the Move in Africa: Past and Present Experiences of Migration, 191–204. Boydell & Brewer, 2016.

Danticat, Edwidge. 2015. Mama’s Nightingale: A Story of Immigration and Separation. Illustrated by Leslie Staub. Illustrated ed. New York: Penguin Young Readers Group.

Ensor, Marisa O., and Elżbieta M. Goździak, eds. 2010. "Introduction: Migrant Children at the Crossroads." In Children and Migration: At the Crossroads of Resiliency and Vulnerability, 1–14. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Razy, Elodie, et al. 2016. Children on the Move in Africa: Past and Present Experiences of Migration. Boydell & Brewer.

Rundell, Katherine. 2023. "Why Adults Should Read Children’s Books." BBC News, July 12, 2023. www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230711-why-adults-should-read-childrens-books.

Save the Children Norway. 2008. A Kit of Tools for Participatory Research and Evaluation with Children, Young People and Adults: A Compilation of Tools Used during a Thematic Evaluation and Documentation on Children’s Participation in Armed Conflict, Post Conflict and Peace Building. https://resourcecentre.savethechildren.net/document/kit-tools-participatory-research-and-evaluation-children-young-people-and-adults compilation/.

UNICEF. 2021. "Migration." April. https://data.unicef.org/topic/child-migration-and-displacement/migration/.

“Wang Oo.” Elephante Commons. www.elephantecommons.org/event-details/wang-oo#:~:text=The%20%22Wang%20oo%22%20is%20an,cultural%20knowledge%20to%20younger%20generations. 

Watson, Alison M. S. “Children and International Relations: A New Site of Knowledge?” Review of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 237–50. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40072136.

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