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"A brilliant and daring book on how art reveals life, how it illuminates childhood beyond what the sciences of development can tell us."
---Jerome Bruner, University Professor, New York University

"Combining the surgical precision of a psychoanalytically informed critic with the oracular eloquence of a brilliant close reader, Ellen Handler Spitz reads our cultural fortunes about childhood and parenting through works of art.  Moving us (in both senses of the term) from the serene plenitude of Piero della Francesca's Madonna of Childbirth to the unsparing horror of Lessing's Fifth Child, she reveals just how powerfully art puts us in touch with the pulsing energies of real life."
---Maria Tatar, John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University 

"Illuminating Childhood is a wonderfully well-written and researched interdisciplinary study of childhood in various media and mediums as well as through ethnicity, race, gender, cultures, and time."
---T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Distinguished Professor of French and Director of African American and Diaspora Studies, Vanderbilt University

While literature and the arts are rarely considered primary sources for knowledge about human motivation and behavior, people read novels, attend movies, watch television, and go to the theater not solely to be entertained but also to learn about one another and about themselves. Illuminating Childhood formalizes this quest for psychological knowledge in the domain of the arts.

Starting with the premise that a gifted writer, artist, or filmmaker has the ability to teach us as much in one scene as a theorist can in a treatise or a therapist in a session, the author shares her intimate experience of eight thematically linked works in film and literature from the second half of the twentieth century, touching on issues central to parent-child relations, including toxic intrafamilial secrets, the disjunction between love and understanding, and the lasting impact of deceased parents on their children. While the canon of literature about children and parent-child relations includes books that identify problems, propose solutions, and present statistical data, Illuminating Childhood offers a living out of experience via the arts, written for a general audience---parents, teachers, mental health professionals, those who engage with their students via the arts of literature and film, and others.

Ellen Handler Spitz holds the Honors College Professorship of Visual Arts at the University of Maryland. She is the author of a number of books on art, psychology, and imagery, including The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood. Her abiding research interests are the cultural lives of young people; the relations between aesthetics and psychology; and the interconnections among literature, music, dance, and the visual arts.

Jacket photo: Courtesy of PhotoFest

Why has Steven Spielberg’s work been so often identified with childhood and children? How does the director elicit such complex performances from his young actors? Steven Spielberg’s Children is the first book to investigate children, childhood, and Spielberg’s employment of child actors together and in depth. Through a series of lively readings of both the celebrated performances he elicits from his young stars in films such as E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, and Empire of the Sun, as well as less discussed roles in films such as War of the Worlds, The BFG, and Jurassic Park, this book shows children to be key players in the director’s articulation of childhood since the 1970s.
 
Steven Spielberg’s Children presents children and childhood in some surprising ways, not only analyzing boyhood and girlhood according to Spielberg, but considering children as alien, adult-children who refuse to grow up, and children who aren’t even human. It discusses the way in which children have served to cast Spielberg as a sentimentalist, but also how they are more frequently framed as complex, cruel, and canny. The child might be dangled as bait in an exploitation horror scenario (Jaws), might become the image of universal higher beings (Close Encounters of the Third Kind), or might be a young cultural creator like the director was himself (The Fabelmans), "born with a camera glued to [his] eye." The child, on both sides of the camera, is a resonant image, signifying all that adult culture wants it to be, yet resisting this through authorship of their own stories. The book also looks at Spielberg's young actors in the long history of child stars in theater and cinema, and how Spielberg’s children have fared as performers and celebrities.
 

In The Movies of Racial Childhoods Celine Parreñas Shimizu examines early twenty-first-century cinematic representations of Asian and Asian American children. Drawing on psychoanalysis and her own perspective as a mother grieving for a deceased child, Shimizu considers how cinema renders Asian American children through sexualized racial difference, infantilization, and premature adultification. She looks at how Asian American childhood is characterized in film through experiences of alienation and trauma and contends that childhood development requires finding freedom and self-sovereignty through agentic attunement. In analyzing films that focus on queer Asian American youth such as Spa Night (2016) and Driveways (2019) and those that explore the trauma of being an immigrant like Yellow Rose (2019) and The Half of It (2020), Shimizu demonstrates that films can prompt viewers to evaluate their own childhood development. They also allow the opportunity to understand the demands placed upon Asian American children, particularly in regard to race and sexuality. In this way, cinema becomes a vehicle for empowering our inner child and the children all around us.