Living in the In-Between: Where’s the Space Between Poverty and Having Everything in Children’s Books?
Living paycheck to paycheck is its own beast, and author Christina Wyman watched her parents navigate this reality. She lived it every day but never saw her reality reflected back at her in the books she was reading.
As I’m sure is the case in many homes, a common refrain in my household as I was growing up was “money doesn’t grow on trees.” Some might say that the stories I write for children are organized around this very theme (and they’d be right).
But this wasn’t just a pithy response that my parents leveled at a couple of kids who demanded the latest toys and gadgets. My dad worked a hard physical job for the New York City transit system. My mom stayed home until we started school, and then she worked part-time for a doctor’s office during those early years. My parents were teenagers when they had me, and not much older than that when my sister was born.
We rented the apartment we lived in and drove clunkers. Once, our car was stolen in the middle of the night (I was supposed to go on my first-ever early morning fishing trip with Dad that same day). We lost another car in an accident. Our apartment building was broken into and our bikes—our primary source of summer entertainment—were stolen.
While my parents worked hard to shield us from our family’s financial difficulties, Dad would openly complain about “living paycheck to paycheck.” Our precarious economic reality was, like many families, the baseline, and narrated our day-to-day life; this was regardless of whether a specific setback, like a broken-down car or an unexpected bill, had occurred. When my parents eventually split, my mother struggled to stay on her feet until she remarried 10 years later. Household bills doubled, as they tend to do when parents no longer live together. As time went on, that old, childhood mantra grew legs and teeth: Money absolutely doesn’t grow on trees.
In all of this, my sister and I always had books, and we’d sprawl out on our bunkbeds or bedroom floor and read, read, read. I loved when book fairs came to my classrooms. There was nothing like those days when fulfilled book orders arrived, and for just a few bucks, I went home with a fresh short stack of brand-new stories.
Decades later, I was given the opportunity of a lifetime to become a writer for children. Just before I began writing my debut novel, Jawbreaker, I taught children’s literature at the college level. It was here that I, alongside my students, examined classic and contemporary books for themes and messages that were present—and absent. Realistic stories for children highlighting the space between poverty and having everything were hard, if not impossible, to come by.
It seems trite and obvious to point out that there is tremendous distance between poverty and having everything. As a child, some of my favorite books featured economically privileged characters who lived and formed a successful babysitting business in one of the most expensive states in the US—even more expensive than my home state of New York. And when I wasn’t reading about the babysitting adventures of young girls my own age, I indulged in Nancy Drew’s detective chops and her skillful navigation of one mystery to the next—all while driving her blue convertible from witness to witness, suspect to suspect.
The books I had access to as a child represented one kind of socioeconomic experience. When I attended school in the 80s and 90s, my peers’ dads—many of them, anyway—were accountants and executives. Some were business owners (this is an understatement—I attended junior high school with one of the heirs to the Arizona Iced Tea fortune). Some of their families had vacation homes in the mountains or on the beach.
Such is the reality of life in our nation’s major cities: It’s normal (and perplexing) to observe how extreme wealth exists alongside middle, working class, and poor families. As a matter of geography, our children often wind up in the same public school classrooms. What I didn’t know then, but can assume now as a teacher and writer for children, is that many of my more well-off peers easily saw their lives reflected back at them in the literature that populated our teachers’ bookshelves.
But I also had classmates who I suspected came from families like my own—parents scraping by to make ends meet. And I’m sure there were children in my classes whose families struggled even harder than anything I’d ever personally known. But if it’s taken this long for realistic depictions of poverty to finally begin showing up in contemporary children’s literature—such as Matt de la Peña’s Last Stop On Market Street and The Benefits of Being an Octopus, by Ann Braden—stories that fall somewhere between poverty and economic privilege still remain relatively few and far between.
For this reason, writing books featuring nuanced main characters who have everything they need, but whose parents simultaneously struggle to make ends meet is one of my main goals. In my debut novel Jawbreaker, and also my upcoming novel Slouch, the middle schoolers I feature deal with the same things most adolescents deal with in life and literature: friendship, complicated family dynamics, building self-esteem and overcoming various obstacles. However, the young characters I create also navigate the nuances of how their parents have to make ends meet, such as when Max’s parents pick up extra shift-work in Jawbreaker. Or it might come in the form of lamenting over a car that’s on its last legs, or struggling to pay rent, as with Stevie’s parents in my forthcoming novel, Slouch.
As a result of watching their parents struggle, the school-age characters I create contend with extreme guilt over expressing their own needs, all the while enjoying the occasional take-out meal or gift from their parents. For families that live in the in-between, it’s never only about financial struggle. They occasionally find ways to indulge, too, like so many families in real life.
My hope for all of my books is that they speak to children who may not otherwise see their socioeconomic realities reflected in the literature they read and to help build empathy in children who’ve not had those experiences. My hope for the industry is that we continue to create stories for and about children with families who oscillate between having everything they need one minute, and struggling to pay bills the next. Such economic realities exist not only across many families today, but also within them. All children deserve to have their lives reflected back at them in literature – for some, it can make all the difference.
Check out Christina Wyman's Slouch here:
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Christina Wyman is a USA Today bestselling author and teacher living in Michigan. Her highly anticipated middle-grade novel, “Slouch,” is about a tall girl navigating friends, family, self-esteem, and boundaries, is available wherever books are sold, including through local independent bookstores. Her debut novel, “Jawbreaker,” a middle-grade book that follows a seventh-grader with a craniofacial anomaly, is a Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2023.
