Beneath the surface of children's stories and rhymes are the deeper meanings that try to reconcile these young people to the concerns occupying of the times in which they live. Consider, for example, this simple, old verse:

Ring around a rosie.
A pocket full of posies.
Hush-a. Hush-a.
We all fall down.

You might even remember it. Children would sing it while holding hands and dancing in a circle. Then, as they recited the last line, they would all fall down, laughing and giggling in delight.

The playful poem was an enactment of death during the Bubonic Plague, the pandemic of the 14th century that killed about a third of Europe's population. The "ring around a rosie" was the initial symptom of the infection, the inflamed circular flush around the centre red spot where the disease first expressed itself on the skin. The "pocket full of posies" was the vain belief that carrying flowers would ward off the contagion. The repetition of "Hush-a" was the sound of the eventual delirium and convulsions. "We all fall down" was the nearly inevitable death.

Idiom and imagery that children can understand acquaint them with the events and worries of their societies. Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks are cautionary stories about danger, trust and deliverance. Cinderella is a story about beauty and love surmounting the adversity of jealousy and connivance. Hansel and Gretel is a story of loyalty and cunning overcoming evil. Other stories offer hope and possibility in times of discrimination and injustice. Mostly, however, such stories identify the realities that pre-occupy the times and prepare children to recognize them, to prepare for them, to accept them or, perhaps, to surmount them.

We can expect the same process to be occurring in our time. And, indeed, this is precisely what is happening as the environmental challenges that worry adults are adopted — sometimes directly, sometimes obliquely — into the literature and entertainment for children. Newsweek (July 21/08) cites some examples, most of them carrying variations of the same ominous scenarios that made the old stories and rhymes so powerfully vivid.

In a series called The Books of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, 100 or so people survive in an underground city after a catastrophic event known only as The Disaster. As adversity plagues this subterranean settlement, two children discover how to escape to the devastated world above. This "apocalypse inside an apocalypse" is written for readers from ages 9 to 12 and is part of a "dark" genre described as "one of the hottest segments of children's literature" today.

In The Hunger Game s by Suzanne Collins, 24 teenagers are engaged in a survival-of-the-fittest struggle against murder and starvation in a traumatic end-of-the world scenario. Because of its expected popularity, Scholastic Books is printing 200,000 copies as an initial press run.

In Susan Pfeffer's Life As We Knew It, children try to survive the extreme weather events caused on Earth after an asteroid collides with the moon. Although the cause of the destructive weather is fictitious, the described events can be construed as a rehearsal for the actual global climate change we can expect from the excessive carbon dioxide we are adding to the atmosphere.

And Wall-E, a digitally animated movie hitting the theatres these days — the related book has sold a million copies — is about a charming robot programmed to endlessly collect and compact garbage on an Earth long ago polluted and then abandoned by humans. Although the movie is charming and gentle, its meaning is blunt and unequivocal.

As Jeanne DuPrau says candidly, "We have more ways of ending the world than we had before. These are big, hard truths that are facing kids, and they need to know these things" (Ibid.). Indeed, if such disturbing possibilities are our bequest to this generation of children because we can't or won't change our legacy to them, then we have an obligation to forewarn them so they can plot survival strategies and plan solutions for a world that may likely be radically different from their present one.

As with all such literature, contends Susan Pfeffer, "You have an obligation when you're writing for a younger audience not to demolish all hope. You have to leave some sense that life will get better" (Ibid.). So, although these new books and movies are scary, the children are usually "smart and courageous...[and are able to] figure out answers to problems with scant adult help" (Ibid.).

But this, of course, is usual. Life is filled with dangers and trials that children must learn to meet and surmount. Like grown people, children, too, need to cultivate the skills that will find them their allotment of love, acceptance, trust, fairness, safety, comfort and fulfilment.

The difference between the children of the past and those of today is the added burden we may be placing on them. Our collective psyche has a growing premonition of disturbance and hardship that — like the years of the Bubonic Plague — could heap huge new challenges upon all the traditional ones. Today's children are becoming aware of this. And with characteristic bravery and optimism, they are preparing.