A Child's Eye View: Dementia in Children's Literature

This paper explores accounts and understandings of dementiathat are encountered infrequently. Children’s views ofdementia are under-explored and yet children, too, must be beinginfluenced by the growing public knowledge of dementia as anamed disease, particularly of old age. The first section notesthat many children will encounter dementia among family members,their grandparents and great-grandparents in particular. Thesecond section considers fictionalized accounts of dementia.These are assuming greater exposure, not so much in the professionalwelfare domain, but as a plot or character device in contemporaryfiction. This paper combines these two areas by discussing anumber of publications written for young people where dementiais a central issue, motif or characteristic. These include dementia-relatedmaterial targeted at a children’s readership. This isfollowed by development of themes arising from analysis of threenovels written for young people, emanating from Canada, Australiaand the UK. The paper ends with a series of discussion pointsfor social-work practitioners, educationalists and voluntary-sectorsupport or self-help groups working in dementia care and inolder people’s services.