Historical or hysterical? Periodising family breakdown in contemporary children's literature
War and the publication of his classic book Child Care and the Growth of Love (1953) marked the beginning of the end of any possible continuing justification for this sort of neglect. Bowlby finally and irreversibly claimed parental love as an imperative for all children, with a similar importance to the presence of vitamins in nutrition. How ironic, therefore, that just at the time when all parents were faced for the first time with the psychological truth about their emotional as well as economic importance for their children, the family itself should become under ever increasing attack. A world where divorce was almost unheard of changed to a time when at least a third of children would experience family disruption. Inevitably children's fiction picked up on this, with the family now often seen as the problem rather than the solution where a child's happiness was the issue. In the new children's fiction that followed, parents however loving were seldom seen at their best when locked in marital conflict, with their children often shown as suffering as a result. There is also the problem, again frequently aired in children's fiction, posed by a new parent coming in as a replacement for someone not dead but simply departed. What price family loyalty now?