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This delightful book, which takes its title from Yeats's “Among School Children” (1928), addresses children's very early experiences with art and demonstrates how the adults who love them can facilitate growth and learning “in their sensory, perceptual, and imaginative lives” (p. 4). Intended as a book for a general audience comprising parents, teachers, librarians, and others closely involved with children, it is surely of interest to psychoanalysts as well.
Handler Spitz began with an “idea of writing a book about first experiences in the traditional arts such as dance, theater, music, literature, and visual art”; she “came to see that children do not separate these out … from other aspects of their lives—from their ordinary excursions, their living spaces, and play spaces, and their holidays” (p. 5). She brings her wide-ranging and unique interests and experiences to bear upon these topics, with chapters on children's relationships with caregivers, music, favorite possessions, birthday parties, and rooms. She also considers how children deal with death, and the effect of childhood aesthetic experiences on their futures as adults.
In each chapter she weaves together various themes, as well as different narrative voices: former child, “artist, dancer, writer, parent and scholar” (p. 4). She uses her expertise in art history and aesthetics, research training in psychoanalysis, and appreciation of popular culture to elucidate “all manner of stories, objects, plays, songs, [and] film” (p. 4), giving extended close readings of several works of art, including an episode of the television program Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, a children's picture book, A Birthday for Frances, Keats's “La Belle Dame sans Merci” (1819), and anecdotes from her own childhood and the lives of her children and those of her friends.