01/07/2026
I was reading a post by Forgotten History today about the author of the award winning children's picture book, Where The Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak. It is a book I have read many times over, to many children, including my own two sons. While I read it BECAUSE of it's ability to draw the reader into reflecting on the power of interception, the ability to notice and makes sense of our internal feelings, I never realised how controversial it was at the time.
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In 1963, Maurice Sendak gave children something no one had thought to hand them: permission to be furious.
His book was about a boy named Max who put on a wolf suit, made mischief, and got sent to bed without supper — and then sailed off in his imagination to an island where enormous wild things roared and gnashed their terrible teeth. Max wasn't punished for the wildness in him. He became king of it. And when he'd had his fill, he sailed home, because home was where someone loved him best of all.
Children understood it immediately. A lot of adults didn't. Some librarians kept it off the shelves; some parents thought it too dark, too frightening for small children. But the children, who tend to recognize the truth long after grown-ups have forgotten how, loved it without reservation.
Where the Wild Things Are was barely forty pages long. It would end up beside the beds of millions of children who didn't yet have words for what moved around inside them — the anger, the fear, the wildness, the need to run away and the equal need to come home. (Credit to Forgotten History)
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What I also find myself considering and admiring while I was thinking upon this treasured picture book, was the way within which Maurice when illustrating the book, also exposed the power of Max in PLAY while he was processing his 'big' emotions. That the PLAY supported him processing and returning to a parasympathetic state, a state of equilibrium, of calm.
Never underestimate the power of PLAY and BOOKS in the life of a child (young and old!).
Kristen
