Original Criteria For Winning the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1953

1. Reconciling opposite viewpoints.
2. Solving emotional problems nonviolently, so that a child may learn from his experience what is involved in the problem, what his responsibility is toward it, and how it can be handled with increasingly satisfactory results for all concerned.
3. Breaking down of suspicion and fear.
4. Overcoming prejudice against things and people and ideas that are different.
5. Understanding of destructive impulses: fear, greed, jealousy, treachery, deceit, and insecurity which breeds them.
6. Approaching life constructively through sympathy, understanding, and security.

The selection criteria have evolved, grown, and been refined over time. The biggest difference between the early criteria and today’s is a change in perspective. The focus no longer rests solely on a book’s just, enlightening, instructive content, coupled with literary merit, but on how the reader interacts with a book. In 1953, the call went out for books with “humor and imagination” and a strong statement of “faith in people” that encouraged the development of a peaceable person. Now, coupled with literary and artistic quality and the criteria focus on how books effectively engage children thinking about peace, social justice, global community, and equality for all people. It is the nature of the dialogue, response, reflection, and questioning which a book engenders in young readers that is key.