As I took a walk up one of my current city's hills, I found myself thinking about children's books. It's a difficult subject for an adult to wrap his head around, especially as there exists a point where our tastes shift and that which seemed so tantalizing and entertaining as a child strikes us as silly and mind-numbing. I personally do not envision myself writing children's literature. I find it too restrictive, as in children's literature you must watch your language, not let it become too violent or disturbing or—God forbid!—too sexual. I write as a means of self-expression, and I do not wish to be constrained by boundaries of appropriateness. I want to be able to ask the hard questions, show the hardships and the dirty little secrets of the world, as well as capture its horror and wonder. I do not feel I am able to do this within the confine of children's or youth's literature.

However, as I hiked step-by-step up one of Montpelier's house-flecked hillocks, I contemplated one situation in which I might be posessed to write a children's story: out of love for my own children.

To set the record straight, I currently have none, and am not seeking any anytime soon. However, I feel that when I do eventually have kids, that I would like to be able to express the love by writing stories that capture their imaginations and give them the same joy that legends such as Robin Hood and King Arthur and The Hobbit gave me as a child. As a teller of tales for very young children, I would probably be no good at all. I can only be so simplistic. But I might find it interesting, at some point in the future, to write something that could be appreciated by an eight-year-old.

Which comes to a thought I had as I ascended the hill: there is a lot of downright bad children's literature out there.

Perhaps I should expand that statement: there is a lot of bad children's media out there.

I know some of it must be accounted for by the different tastes of children and adults, however I believe some of it comes from an inability for us to take our children seriously and trust them with real issues, especialy when it comes to our older children.

Case in point: the Thunderbirds movie. It's a flick apparently aimed at the ten to twelve or thirteen-year-old crowd, which makes me wonder why my parents decided to rent it while I was still living with them. The trailer, though, showed some promise. The Thunderbirds are a team of heroes in posession of highly advanced technology, and the story follows the son of the group's leader. Somewhat disconnected, he soon finds that he's "the only one left" when an accident estranges him from his parents and their teammates. Seemed cheesy, but a little interesting. I decided to watch it with the rest of my family.

I couldn't sit through the whole thing. I had expected, somehow, that the family and comrades of the protagonist would die, leaving the young hero to defeat the villain on his own. That would have been a very compelling story. What followed was a simpering, slimy, appeal to base commercialism.

Instead of dying, the Thunderbirds are stranded on the team's space station, while the villain and his forces take over their island base and conspire to use their technology to rob a bank. A bank. You'd think that this villain, who harbored a grudge against the Thunderbirds who failed to save him in an accident some time back, would be driven more by sheer vengeance. It is the task of the young heroes to save their parents—who could, in turn, save the day. The conflict established between father and son dissipates without reason, and in the end the son spares the life of the villain, because "it's [their] job" to save people. And, in the denoument, the protagonist compliments his lady-love on her "budding" womanhood in a pathetic appeal to pre-teen sexuality.

I have not given the best description of the film, and I understand that the nature of the movie was to be a light-hearted, entertaining bit of cinematic cotton candy. Yet, the basic premise had so much more potential. In a Thunderbirds where the parents die, the hero would face the challenge of deciding what to do next. Would he simply go about his normal school life, fading into the background against the rising tide of evil, or would he take up the dangerous and thorny path of avenging his family, risking death but standing to gain an understanding of himself as a person and an adult? But the producers did not decide to take this route. Instead, they made a Thunderbirds where some slightly bad things happen because of a slightly bad man, the supremacy of the parents and the dependency of the children are reinstated in wondrous 50's harmony. These are the trappings of a fine "family" movie.

I have to make dinner now, so I shall close for today. But when I come back tomorrow, I shall elucidate the idea that, even in children's media, it is necessary to put the hero through hell before we see the light, and how the Thunderbirds paradigm reflects a tendency amongst American parenthood to shelter their children from the world instead of initiating them into it.