Children’s books piss me off.

[mizkit]

We have a baby book called “Time for Christmas”, starring Duck and Goose. It has rather charming paintings, each depicting a wonderful, fun activity-building snow forts, making snow angels, having snowball fights, skating on the frozen pond, sledding, etc-

-and the text for every page is “It is NOT time for sledding/skating/building snow forts”,

Comments

[irishkate]

I can't understand those books and suspect there is some secret publishing information which allowed this dross to get made into read books for kids.

[mylescorcoran]

I suspect the same. There are some clearly wonderful and superior picture books for kids and then there's complete crap, and I don't understand how they get equal attention from the publishers and promoters.

Grr.

[roseaponi]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who gets weirded out by kids books - before I had kids, all books were too precious to throw away. Now I can make exceptions. :(

I think people are going for cheap shots for their surprise endings:/

There was a winner of the Cheerios book contest (they published the book and distributed it in the cereal boxes! Brilliant! ) that was "How do You Hug a Porcupine?" I was starting to get concerned that the porcupine wouldn't get a hug, but it was solved at the end, so I thought that was an example of a good surprise end.

[verseblack]

While I remember plenty of young children's books from when I was a kid, I hadn't really seen many of the tiny baby books until I started getting some as gifts for my new arrival. And you are right, some of these are downright disturbing. I mean, I'm not one who goes around looking to be offended by innocent things, and I'm likely a bit tone-deaf when it comes to some PC issues, but I was still raising my eyebrows. I think I'll stick to accidently warping my child with fairy tales...

[roseaponi]

The sort of warping from fairy tales is apparently benign, if not outright beneficial, anyway ;) I mean, hey, when weird stuff happens, you have to know what to do and not do, right? Say what you mean and mean what you say is a great takeaway lesson from any story involving fairies ;)

[idiosyncreant]

Even though I don't have kids when I come across a good picture book I buy one. Because they are rare, and if I can enjoy them they're worth having.

Some of my favorites are a little more advanced, but for example I like "Rabbit Pirates of the Spinach Main".

I have the same problem with a lot of the picture books that I have with fairy tale retellings: that people are bringing a deconstructionist bitterness to it without the glee of finding the spark of a story and making it work in a new way.

Some of the big "Treasury" books have some gems and some problem-children, but are worth it for the gems...

[burger_eater]

I wouldn't have expected you to be an "indoctrinate" reader.

I liked those books because that's peoples' real world experience. Some people get picked last, sometimes families fight, sometimes they taunt. I wanted to show those things to my son even at a small age.

I don't think you can indoctrinate someone into something they would do naturally anyway.