My Unsolicited Parental Advice – Part 2: Little Books that Can’t

(from 2005)

Growing up, I had such fond memories of The Little Engine that Could.  But I never noticed just how badly it was written until I started reading it to my own daughter.  First of all, in a thirty-five-page book, the title character isn’t even introduced until page twenty-six.  Bad start.  After that, his only conflict is this little hill.  There’s no struggle, no character arc, and no moment of crisis where it seems like the good little boys and girls on the other side of the mountain might not get their toys.  The train says, “I think I can” a couple times, and then he’s done.

Talk about your go-nowhere plot.  If it only takes him a page and a half to get over that mountain, maybe it wasn’t such a daunting obstacle to begin with.  Beyond that, I don’t feel as though I’ve truly gotten to know this Little Engine.  What were his hopes and dreams?  What demons from his past is he trying to overcome?  Above all, what did he learn from his experience on the mountain?  I guess we’ll never know.

The fact that this book and others like it are regarded as classics just shows you what kind of bleak landscape the pre-Seuss literary world was.  Personally, I blame the Baby Boomers.  (Though, I tend to blame them for most of the bad things in this world.) After thirty years of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, they started looking back on their trite, empty little lives and yearned for some shred of lost innocence to pass on to the next generation.  Then one day in the late seventies, some Madison Avenue yuppie leaned over the mirror on his desk and said, “<<ssssssnort >> Um… wasn’t there a cute story about some little blue train pulling toys?  <<sniff>>”  Next thing you knew, every one of them was trying in vain to save their souls by reading this dreadful mockery of the written word to their Ritalin-filled kids.

Unfortunately, I’m discovering that, with few exceptions, today’s kid books aren’t much better.  Take, for instance, Five Little Ducks, in which a mother duck loses one of her children each day they go out.  Then at the end of the book, the little ducks just come back on their own.  Mother Duck doesn’t have to look for them.  She never seems to show any emotion over their disappearance.  She’s just a docile protagonist who gets saved in the end by an embarrassing use of the deus ex machina device.  The only reason I think this particular book got published in the first place was because, in some messed up way, it teaches kids about subtraction.  But jeez, must we invoke the fear of missing children to demonstrate basic math?

But they’re not all bad.  I can dig The Very Hungry Caterpillar.  Even though the title character’s M.O. is somewhat dubious, at least he’s proactive about accomplishing his goal of eating as much as possible.  Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed is fun in a sing-songy way, and although I do take issue with a mama who continually fails to heed her doctor’s advice, the book does illustrate the concept of subtraction under less tragic circumstances than Five Little Ducks.

Not that I even require a book with a traditional story arc.  Our personal favorite is My Many Colored Days by Doctor Seuss, which uses brightly colored paintings and unconnected vignettes to simply give voice and validation to each of our daughter’s emotions.  If only they could all be like the Seuss, man.  Even now, looking at his work objectively without the beer goggles of early childhood, his books are still fun with fresh ideas that make you laugh and, more importantly, make you think.

I know…  They’re only kid’s stories.  And yes, right now The Girl is paying more attention to the pictures and sound of my voice than to the central theme and plot.  But I think we’ve lived under the lie the book publishers have sold us for long enough: the myth that “it doesn’t matter what you read to your kids as long as you’re reading.”

NO, I say.  This is America!  Since when did we allow ourselves to just blindly accept such low standards?  Unless a book is funny, rhymes or has particularly engaging illustrations, then I for one refuse to continue letting some burnt-out ex-hippie in a suit dictate what is good for my daughter just so he can alleviate the guilt over his own wasted life.

I hope you will join me.