Boring Childhoods

Writes Mark Ravenhill in the Guardian, “I always skip the first hundred or so pages of a biography. Childhoods are never interesting.” For adult readers, that is. Children, on the other hand, are often equally bored with adulthood. At least that has been my observation of the children I’ve worked with over the years. Of course, if the adulthood is sufficiently dramatic they will be interested, but they gravitate mostly to stories and books about children — their peers. Even if they live in different times and places, they have childhood in common. So these adults who skip the childhood sections of biographies are obviously far, far away from their own child times. Personally and no doubt because I do work with children, I find the childhood sections fascinating.

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