Three Parents Talk About Children's Books

The celebrity of the moon, the going-to-bed plot, against moralizing

Last week I recorded a conversation at the kitchen table with my partners and co-parents, Lily and Grace. We had most of our son Rocco’s books laid out in front of us, and Rocco himself spent most of the discussion in our midst. He is seventeen months old and likes to knock things over.

[A more complete breakdown of Rocco’s activity during recording: 40% clambering over the table, 10% grabbing the recording device, 10% needing to be changed, 20% roaming under the table gabbling to himself, 20% being held by various parents.]

DANNY: All right. Hopefully we will all be audible on this recording, and the baby will not steal the phone constantly.

LILY: Mm. Are we recording now?

DANNY: I am recording now.

LILY: Okay. Hey, baby. [Rocco lurches into her lap off the table.]

ROCCO: No.

LILY: Well, you wrote that Good Night Moon newsletter a while ago, about how I mentioned that Rocco gets Good Night Moon read to him, like, nine times a day.

ROCCO: No. No, no.

LILY: And I myself enjoy reading it over and over again. That's probably the case with most of these books. And I think that it's really remarkable that, you know, I as a sophisticated 44-year-old, I’m perfectly happy to read, you know, Good Night Goon and Boo and Baa Get Wet.¹

ROCCO: [Clangs.]

GRACE: Well, Boo and Baa Get Wet is a classic.

DANNY: I love Boo and Baa. I think that might be my favorite series of his.

ROCCO: Baby!

GRACE: “Good night, you, get under there” — I think the thing I like about that one is the prosody. It’s really good.

DANNY: Whereas I feel like, Have You Ever Seen A Flower, which I love, the text is really trying too hard sometimes —

GRACE: Well, that’s a book about the saturation of image. I mean, there are words in it, but it’s mostly about blood turning into flowers, and flowers turning into blood —

DANNY: I wish it would scale back on the prosody. I always feel like, you’ve got great stuff here, you don’t need to be asking precious questions about columns and labyrinths. It reminded me of that one book we had from the library for a while — the pond book about that kid who kept yelling something stupid, like “Spectacular!” or “Audacious!” or something?²

LILY: Yeah, “That’s exceptional,” or something.

GRACE: He had a little catch phrase?

DANNY: Yeah, it just felt like the author was really pleased with himself for sounding clever and it made me furiously angry, so I returned it early.

LILY: Well, I think they were trying to make the kid in the book sound precocious and like he was from another time. There was kind of a steampunk element to that book also, which I think we also didn’t like, and the language made it sound like some sort of mashup of Edwardian speech with like, Midwestern postwar aesthetics.

GRACE: I think I must have blocked this one, or missed it, because I don’t remember.

DANNY: We didn’t read it often, and I took it back pretty quick, so that might be why. And I do, you know, I have a bias towards those mid-century animal books, books about little everyday rituals, like “someone ran an errand and it went a little wonky,” and I tend to get antsy about anything that feels like it’s trying too hard to impart a childhlike sense of wonder to the child. Because they’ve already got that childlike sense of wonder! You don’t need to gild that lily!

GRACE: So you’re saying things were better in the olden days?

ROCCO: Arr.

DANNY: Well, the real olden days of children’s literature is Victorian, which is nothing of not self-consciously trying to screw a sense of wonder onto everything.