Is not children’s literature a method of shaping? Indeed as a child is much more susceptible to being shaped it can be argued that children’s literature does this much better then any novel intended for adults ever could.

Literature is also a form of entertainment, something that children’s literature most certainly is as well. Great literature for children is more then this however as picture books is often created to be read by one person to another. In other words picture books can be a form of entertainment for adults and kids alike. They are often a social form of entertainment and so have direct social value.

In all ways then children’s literature is as important or perhaps more important social then that which is created for adults. Because of this importance it is defiantly worth studying, both for the purposes of allowing the public to know what it does and how it works, but also to allow those who create children’s books to understand it.

What is Children's Literature

The need for a Cross Cultural Analysis of Children's Literature

Cross-Cultural Analysis is about more then simply a study of another culture, or in this case another cultures books for children. Cross-Cultural studies are a comparison, a way of finding out both the importance and impact of aspects of cultures by viewing other cultures. It is often a very systematic approach to studying cultures, as will as our own. Children's books and literature in general is a cultural phenomenon, children's literature is our way of passing on our thoughts to the next generation, of socializing them. It is also our way of communicating what we are as a culture. Certainly different writers and different groups have different messages within our country, this however only indicates even more the need for children's literature to be analyzed using cross-cultural methods. To help us understand what values we are transmitting using different types of books and pictures. 

Cross cultural research in children's literature can also help us come to understand what values are truly important to society as a whole, by examine the values that different societies emphasize as compared to the values other societies emphasize we can come to understand both societies better. Certainly a simple study of literature could give us some idea of what values exist in children's books, we could discover through this how often the certain values appear in the children's books. However this gives us no idea of how valuable such things are compared to another culture, at least in literary message, nor does it allow us to gage the full impacts of such messages. As debates rage among the educational community about the actual impact of different types of entertainment on children, the only solution is through comparisons of the actual impact of such things. Certainly culture in general can be a factor which would tend to make such comparisons difficult, however any major research in the social sciences and humanities requires multiple tools to be successful.  And Cross cultural research could be such a tool.