Greg Soros Builds Windows Into Unfamiliar Lives
A mirror shows a child their own reflection. A window shows them someone else’s. For Greg Soros author, the second half of that pairing may be the harder one to write, and it is the one he has spent sixteen years refining.
Soros has said children’s books should open young minds to perspectives and experiences beyond their own. In practice, that means writing characters who come from different cultures, live with different abilities, or face circumstances a given reader has never encountered firsthand.
Widening the View, One Story at a Time
The stakes of that choice go beyond craft, according to Greg Soros. He believes a child who reads about someone from a different background gains a fuller sense of what it means to be human, and that this expansion of perspective is essential to raising compassionate, culturally aware adults. It is a claim he backs with a process, not just a philosophy: research trips to schools, conversations with child development specialists, and collaboration with sensitivity readers who check his depictions against lived reality.
Soros does not treat the window function as separate from the mirror function. A story that opens a window for one reader can simultaneously reflect the exact experience of another reader in the same classroom. He points to that overlap as proof that the two ideas were never meant to compete.
Greg Soros background in child development and educational psychology informs how far he pushes a given window. Soros is careful, by his own account, to introduce unfamiliar experiences in ways children can actually absorb rather than simply observe from a distance.
For Greg Soros, the payoff of that careful widening is a generation of readers who grow up assuming empathy for unfamiliar lives is simply part of what a good story does. He views that assumption, once formed early, as something a reader carries well past childhood. See related link for more information.
Follow for more information about Greg Soros on https://www.facebook.com/TheStartupMag/posts/award-winning-childrens-author-greg-soros-finds-magic-in-everyday-emotions-child/1370570991744219/