One Sunday, I sat in a coffee shop across from a picture-perfect scene. A mother enjoyed the Sunday paper and an espresso while her son, who looked about five or six, enjoyed a coloring book and an apple juice. The boy became distracted though, as his mother put down the front page section. “What’s that?,” he asked, pointing at a picture which, like so many newspaper photos do, showed the fallen semblances of a building, guns, someone wailing, and indefinable body parts.

“Oh, you don’t want to look at that,” the woman answered quickly but kindly. Like any intelligent child would, the son dutifully asked “Why not?”

“It’s not very nice.”

“Why not?”

Instead of answering her son’s question, the mother abruptly changed the subject. The child looked put out. The picture-perfect scene crumbled. I looked at my own paper, trying to avoid the awkwardness that I felt in sympathy with her situation. How do we explain war? How do we explain the larger issues to someone who’s just been coloring a picture of Big Bird, but nonetheless wants desperately to know?

A child who grows up being spoken to as though his opinions and his thoughts are valid is a child who will do great things with them. If we doubt children’s ability to understand the darker and more complex issues of our society, then they will grow up believing that they have no responsibility of their own to improve it.

I thought of this incident again during this past presidential election as reports flew around the web regarding McCain’s grossly misspoken slur against Obama’s stance on sex education. Once again, adults couldn’t seem to agree on how and when to explain the larger issues to our kids, and even went so far as to use this confusion against each other. Granted, sex education and war seem like very distant issues and I do feel that there exist some things that children cannot fully comprehend. However, I also feel that in these kinds of situations, children and their knowledge are never quite given the benefit of a doubt, and certainly not the honest discourse that they deserve. These examples of adults assuming the least of what children are capable of understanding remind me of a question posed by Tony Kushner in The Art of Maurice Sendak, 1980 to the Present. He wonders, while writing about the life and art of a man who has for half a century defined our childhoods, “in a world of trouble, in a pitiless world, how is one to speak to the young? How much is one to tell a child of the injustices and dangers he or she will confront?” Looking at that mother and her son, I knew why it is that we’re afraid to talk to those younger than us about issues that they may not understand: it’s hard, and potentially traumatic. But what are the consequences of not letting children see what they’re up against?

Kushner and I share an admiration for a man who knows the difficulty of this balance. When I see adults who clearly are a little befuddled when it comes to explaining what a strange place the world can be to a child who, as children do, only want to be told the truth, I think of Sendak’s We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy. Like so many children’s books, The Dumps yields amusement with the first glance and wonder with the second. With that second glance, we notice that the young, wide-eyed characters featured in this work are on the street and dressed, at best, in rags and newspapers bearing headlines such as “Leaner times, meaner times,” and “AIDS epidemic grows.” The children in Sendak’s book, while drawn with simple care and expressive, rich colors, truly are in the dumps.

Now, the coffee-drinking mother may not feel that putting a picture of suffering children in front of her well-fed, healthy son is an appropriate idea, but Sendak knows what he’s about. He uses his honed artistic talent to reel in his audience, then takes them on a journey of great pathos. A kid is stolen off the street by a gang of menacing rats who then keep him hostage. Jack and Guy, the book’s reluctant heroes, must overcome their ambivalence to find and save the child and bring him back to the fold of his alleyway friends.

Jack and Guy’s reluctance is one that children may not immediately understand. They are hesitant to help because the kidnapped kid, like all of the children in The Dumps, does not have any familial ties to either of them. Why should they care what happens to him? Children turning the pages of this book may know to expect cruelty of the vicious rats, but not this sort of hardened, more subtle result of a pitiless life from those we expect to be the heroes. Of course, Sendak allows the happy ending, and that allowance is a moral in itself: the kid is saved but, more importantly, Sendak works in hope through a rejection of ambivalence. Jack and Guy become reflections of the audience with both their fear and their sympathy. Sendak seems to tell his young readers that they, too, could end up like this. The world is a troubled and pitiless place. What he advocates is that his readers never allow themselves to become jaded towards the plights of others. He never, like so many adults who believe that they know how to speak to children, glosses over the truth or avoids a question. Instead, he paves the way for candor and also for comfort, a thing that many adults have forgotten exists.

It’s through this idea of responsibility instead of jadedness that Sendak sets an example for both his young readers and the adults who would learn this candor. The title of his book is both a statement of the initial situation and a banner advertising that situation’s grace. We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy; made of the joining together of two nursery rhymes, this title suggests simple honesty in a language that children can understand and also the comfort of community. As Kushner puts it, “We may be in the dumps, but we are all in there.” Taking off from Kushner’s idea of The Dumps as a cry for social responsibility, I think that it also functions as an example of parental responsibility. If we are all in the dumps together, mired deep in a world of war, economic struggle and all other kinds of cruelty, then we owe it to our children to be, as Sendak is, completely honest. We must participate in a discourse with our children about not only what they have to fear, but also what they have to be lucky for. A child who grows up being spoken to as though his opinions and his thoughts are valid is a child who will do great things with them. If we doubt children’s ability to understand the darker and more complex issues of our society, then they will grow up believing that they have no responsibility of their own to improve it, just like Jack and Guy do in the beginning. They will see in themselves someone not tied closely enough to suffering to have any effect on it, and this is a tragedy far worse than that of a child seeing something that is not very nice.