'There are lots of psychology professionals who support the theory that the stories we read in childhood and the characters we identify with help to form our life pattern in later life. I invite your contributors to look at their own life pattern and see if they can see links with who they were as children.
'One woman identified with Heidi, the story of a little girl who befriends a little boy with a physical disability that affected his walking. She was later shocked to find that she was the carer of a husband who was wheelchair bound and resenting it.
'Another woman had been hooked on adventure stories and wanted to be married to a hero, she did find her outdoor hero in the form of a wildlife photographer and complained that she was stuck at home being the domestic and raising children alone while he went off exploring and having fun.
'What is also difficult to come to terms with is that real grown up life is rarely as exciting as our childhood fantasies. The male heroes in picture books don't have smelly feet and watch football and the heroines don't suffer from PMT and complain when they don't get enough attention.'
Dr Pauline Rennie-Peyton
Dr Pauline Rennie-Peyton is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in relationships www.renniepeyton.com
*** We would be fascinated to read people's stories or thoughts on these kinds of links, and interested to know what your children are reading now.' ***
It's an interesting theory that what we read influences who we are but I wonder if in finding these patterns we could be mixing up cause and effect. If I read and like books about heroes, does this mean that I will in later life look for men who are heroes (and be disappointed) as suggested? Or is that even as a child I am already attracted to heroic people and that's why I choose to read, and like, books about heroes in the first place (and will also look for men who are heroes later in life as that is my already formed preference)? I think the latter is just as likely: our reading patterns even as children are a reflection of the people we have already become, rather than things which shape our future personalities. Naming characters with whom we identified is illuminating because it reveals something about our emotions and expectations; that is not the same as saying that these characters are normative forces in those emotions and expectations.
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