HOW BIBLIOTHERAPHY MAY BENEFIT YOUNG LEARNERS (IN MALAYSIA)

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-p.m-

       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)