Moggy’s Coming is the name of a new picture book for primary school children, written by a team of doctors. It has the grim task of preparing under-10s for the eventuality of a school shooting or a terrorist attack. If we leave aside, for a moment, the gruesomeness of the necessity for such a thing, there is a bit to be learnt from how the authors have gone about their task.
Communicating with children offers useful, if exaggerated, examples of the approaches used to communicate with adults — children being remote from an adult worldview and with shorter attention spans — and Moggy’s Coming demonstrates them in spades.
First: go to where the audience is. Children cannot be expected to understand, and might be expected to be terrified by, a realistic explanation of what it would mean to have a terrorist burst into a school playground with a gun or a knife. So Moggy’s Coming works by analogy: it tells the story of a cat breaking into a school of mice.