Christian Children’s Books for the Filipino Child

At Taal Vista Lodge in Tagaytay, 20 children’s book authors gathered for the Hiyas Authors’ Huddle to pitch, discuss, and refine their stories. Today, those stories have become books.

Some authors came with long-established careers in children’s literature. Together with others who are new to the field, they brought experience in child development, spiritual nurturing, educational psychology, pedagogy, advocacy, and other fields, all anchored in faith and a deep concern for the Filipino child.

A child grows within relationships, values, culture, social conscience, traditions, and faith, all of which simultaneously shape the space in which the child grows. Authors and publishers understand this. They recognize that the Department of Education’s K to 12 framework envisions the Filipino learner as maka-Diyos, makatao, makabansa, and makakalikasan, a whole person formed not by books alone, but by the many influences that surround a child.

From the Hiyas Authors’ Huddle in Tagaytay to published books: Christian children’s stories written with the Filipino child in mind.

Christian Literature in Child Formation

Every title from the Huddle that is now in bookstores has decided, in one way or another, whom it hopes to reach. The child’s world in each story is not incidental. What is at stake in every tale begins with a clear sense of a child’s curiosities, emotions, relationships, and family values.

What is interesting is that every discipline and profession brings its own angle to a child’s world and point of view. A missionary, a teacher, a lawyer, a broadcaster, a poet, an educator, each sees something urgent and crucial. Realistic about what a children’s book can accomplish, they are equally realistic about how widely any one book may be read. The more grounded expectation is for the right book to find the right child at the right moment, and for something in that story to stay with that child.

The books recognize that children are not passive recipients of values. Children are selective. They linger over what interests them, laugh at what adults may overlook, and may abandon a book at the first uninviting picture. They are relentlessly honest about what they like, and what they do not.

Every Hiyas book may carry an intended value or lesson, but the child will feel the truth of a story, the emotion of a character, the humor of a moment, and the thrill of turning to the next page. Only the child-reader can tell us whether the book has earned that attention.

And that attention now competes with everything else a child can encounter, especially on a digital screen. The author may be aware of the obvious challenge, but cannot stop at an abstract question about audience reaction. What is more immediate is the question of reading itself: What makes a child pick up this book, and what makes that child want to keep reading?

How Children Discover Published Books

The other reality is how the child will find the book. There are really only two ways: they discover it themselves, or somebody lets them know it exists. Published children’s books need to appear where parents look for books, where teachers recommend them, where librarians select them, where churches build reading collections, and where children themselves can browse and discover.

Hopefully, parents, teachers, and children will see these books at the Manila International Book Fair. The colorful illustrations may invite the first look on the Hiyas Books, while social media may help carry the book farther. And there is the oldest and perhaps most trusted form of discovery: word of mouth.

The book is now an open door, and what happens after that is no longer entirely in the writer’s hands. The writer’s intention now carries a sense of circumspection: from what the author hopes the child will receive to an awareness of how the child’s world may spin or sway when the child actually sees, feels, questions, accepts, rejects, or carries away a tale.

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