Nov

I love the opening of this article about children’s books and parenting that was published in The New Yorker a month ago:

Anxious parents — the midnight Googlers who repeatedly seek advice from experts — learn that there are many things they must never do to their willful young child: spank, scold, bestow frequent praise, criticize, plead, withhold affection, take away toys, “model” angry emotions, intimidate, bargain, nag. Increasingly, nearly all forms of discipline appear morally suspect. The educator Alfie Kohn, writing recently in the Times, condemns the timeout — the canonical punishment of recent decades — declaring that it is more honest to say you are “forcibly isolating” your child. Even an approach as seemingly benign as awarding gold stars, Kohn warns, is a manipulation that “teaches children that they are loved” only when they perform a “good job.”

I’m not a parent, but many of my colleagues — and many of our readers, of course — are, and I’ve heard enough parenting stories over my three years at the magazine to totally freak me out about one day raising my own offspring. Usually, though, the stories that freak me out aren’t about the children themselves; they’re the stories about what the New Yorker writer, Daniel Zalewski, touches on in his opener: the scads of conflicting advice, contradictory studies, quarrelling experts and the parents who pledge their allegiances and then chide everyone else for doing it “wrong.” (My colleague Rachel wrote an excellent story about “parenting by panic,” in our Holiday issue.)

I’ve never given much thought to the parenting that can take place through children’s books. It’s funny because, if you were to look through my bookcases, you might be surprised that I don’t have a kid or two hiding in my teeny rented apartment, on account of all of the Beatrix Potter, Dr. Seuss, Shel Silverstein, Dennis Lee, dozens of fairy tales (my favourite souvenirs from traveling), and the book that I could recite from memory long before I could read, Madeline. (“In an old house in Paris that was covered in vines lived twelve little girls, in two straight lines…”)

But Zalewski points out that the heroes of today’s children’s books aren’t quite what you might expect. One fairly new character he describes as, “a surly schoolgirl whose beady eyes, encircled in red orbs, suggest a legacy of refused naps, Constance is a manipulator of demonic proportions.” This little girl gets away with everything, while her parents apparently stand by, helplessly. And Zalewski seems to think that this portrayal pretty closely resembles real life: “The parents in today’s stories suffer the same diminution in authority felt by the parents reading them aloud (an hour past bedtime). The typical adult in a contemporary picture book is harried and befuddled, scurrying to fulfill a child’s wishes and then hesitantly drawing the line. And the default temperament of the child is bratty, though often in a way so zesty and creative that the behavioral transgressions take on the quality of art.”

I fondly remember Madeline, who was written to life in 1939, as being willful and a little hell-raising, perhaps making her the great- great- great- great-grandmother of Constance. And it isn’t a leap to suggest that today’s parents are harried. But I wonder how the parents in the room feel about introducing their kids to Constance.

— Jacqueline Nunes

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