HI THERE! IF YOU ARE AN UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT AND LOOKING FOR MATERIALS FOR WRITINGS, THEN HERE'S SOME. THIS IS MY ORIGINAL WORK (which I got an A+ on it), BUT I'M WILLING TO SHARE TO ANYONE IN NEED... PLEASE BE NICE AND SAY "THANK YOU" ONCE YOU'VE GOT WHAT YOU NEED AND REMEMBER TO STATE YOUR REFERENCES. GOOD LUCK IN YOUR WORK AND HAVE A NICE DAY.
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In the
current global era, children’s life is significantly different from how it was
many years back. Today’s children, especially those growing up in the developed
countries, are facing physically agonizing, mentally traumatizing, and life
changing experiences before they are even mature enough to have the ability of
handling them. The inability to accept, understand and cope with their life’s
problem is usually the reason why most of the children ended up being emotionally
unstable, demotivated, lost their confidence, and at last being unsuccessful in
later stage of their life.
Being
aware of this, many efforts has been put up in order to find the solution for
this matter. One of the widely used methods of helping these kinds of children
nowadays is Bibliotherapy. Bibliotherapy by definition is a form of supportive
psychotherapy in which carefully selected reading materials are used to assist
a subject in solving personal problems or for other therapeutic purposes (The
American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 2000). Therefore, in the
therapeutic field we have today, bibliotherapy holds a huge importance in child
development.
Generally, bibliotherapy aims to assist
children in overcoming their problems by having them read stories about
characters who have successfully resolved a problem just like theirs. Young
children are mostly unable to understand their feelings and express themselves;
therefore, stories may serve as a platform of open discussion and
self-understanding to them. As reading is thought from the earliest stage of
their life, children are very familiar to it. This in turn makes bibliotherapy
to be the perfect method in helping them with life’s problem. Reading suitable literary
pieces with their problem will enable them to identify and validate their
feelings subconsciously. To be able to achieve this however, emotional
involvement in literary characters and characterization is crucial, and this
will lead to the drive for the children to speak, act out or draw pictures to
describe their innermost thoughts (Davies, 1999).
Bibliotherapy, on top of that, is also an
effective method to inform children about problem that may occur to them and their
peers. Therefore, bibliotherapy is actually educating the children about the
truth about life – the realities of life – in a more gentle and delicate way.
This way, children would be aware of the world and its dark sides, and they
will build a general cognitive scheme pertaining to this.
Undoubtedly, most young children who fell
into dilemmas may have not reach a cognitive development level where they are
able to identify their problems, let alone understanding the means of
overcoming them. Thus, bibliotherapy may become a very useful tool for them to
see that they are not alone in the situation – the sense of mutuality. The
children’s mind may be open to other individual, when they are made aware that
what they are experiencing is a known problem, there is a solution for that,
and there are other people who may be able to help them. Having the sense that
they might share mutual trauma with others would in turn assist them in coping
with their problems.
Preceding that, bibliotherapy is able to
stimulate discussion among the students with other individuals as they have
acquired the sense of mutuality. Thus, bibliotherapy also helps in building the
sense of empathy within children. Initially, human are not necessarily born
with empathy (Swayer, 2004, p.246). Through books, children learn not only
about their feelings, but of others as well. This in turn will encourage
discussions with other individuals. Through discussions, children will learn
how they can be verbal about their emotions in pursuit of finding resolution
for their problems, on top of understanding more deeply about the meanings of
humanity.
Other
than that, through bibliotherapy students are actually doing researches on
possible options for the solution to their problems. Through books, children
will be given the chance to ponder upon alternative means of problem solutions.
Stimulation is another way to put it. Children’s mind may sometimes be
unpredictable. Through bibliotherapy, children will have the stimulations from
their reading materials in order to come up with their own version of problem
solution. In short, bibliotherapy is giving children the options of action.
On top
of being an effective psychological cure for children, bibliotherapy is also a
perfect tool for teachers to encourage reading activities among their students.
Therefore, bibliotherapy is not only subjected to be applied on troubled
children, but generally, to any child or teenager. For students who do not have
any particular trauma in their lives, reading literary materials used for
bibliotherapy may enable them to become more understanding towards their peers
who does. Thus, it may be possible for the children who suffer dilemmas, may
find comfort from their peers who understand their emotional state.
Subconsciously,
bibliotherapy will teach them many things that we do not teach directly via
school curriculum. Through bibliotherapy, students are able to explore,
question, improvise and relate social and psychological issues they have read
from books, with their own personal life or the life of the people close to
them. Teachers are most unlikely to teach these matters like they do in typical
classes at school. As reading activity is a process where, most of the time,
readers have to be dependable on themselves for interpretations, the lessons or
knowledge they gain are more likely pose greater impact towards them and last
longer than information put into their mind by others.
The penultimate abstract is; bibliotherapy
helps troubled children to see that life is not all ugly. Of course there are
times where life can be a grim, sordid, dark and cold. But that is not the sole
picture of the world. Though it’s not perfect, but the world if filled with
joyous, colourful and warm home. It is filled with life. Bibliotherapy may become a tool to keep the
children’s hearts beating, and pursuit the beauty of the world and make their
life with living.
As a
summation, bibliotherapy is a powerful remedy in assisting children who suffer
traumatic experiences. On top of that, it is also useful in educating other
applicants who may not necessarily be a psychiatric patient. In the field of
education, bibliotherapy is also a great tool to encourage and provoke reading
activities and interest, in line with the nation’s educational aspiration of
having citizens who value reading as a daily routine of life.
(1055
words)
