Why I’m Still Reading ‘Problematic’ Children’s Books to My Daughter
A Defense of Reading Great (and Imperfect) Classics Together—Without Turning Every Story into a Moral Purity Test
I love reading to my daughter, but I had to make a change. Naomi is seven now. When she was five, I began to tire of reading picture books every night before bed. Yes, some large-format books with their vivid, colorful illustrations are fantastic. I still cherish my childhood copy of Rain Makes Applesauce, passed along from my older cousin (also named Joel, as it happens).
I just couldn’t read another or my brain would melt.
“We’re switching to chapter books,” I told her, and that night we dove into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. She loved it. I had a blast too.
She still adores the sprawling, illustrated fare with (hopefully) clever themes and ideas, and we read them together from time to time. She now mostly reads those to herself, sometimes sharing her favorites with me. When we read together, however, we now work our way through more substantial stories.
The bedtime ritual usually involves the two of us, snuggled up and reading something I hope will delight me as much as it does her. It’s not hard to do; the best children’s books enthrall adults as much as our kids. We just finished The Indian in the Cupboard a few nights ago—so good!—and we’ve been working our way through The Chronicles of Narnia. We’re reading The Silver Chair now. I can’t wait until she’s ready for Madeleine L’Engle and Harry Potter.
As we turn our way through a book, Naomi always reads me the opening page of every chapter, and then I take over until the next chapter starts. It’s been fun to see her reading skill improve as she navigates awkward vocabulary and learns the rhythm of sentences.
What’s appropriate for kids at whatever ages? That’s a little tricky to navigate. I was gung-ho on starting A Wrinkle in Time once we finished The Chronicles of Narnia. There are eight books in L’Engle’s Murry-O’Keefe Family Chronicles, but Megan suggested they might be a little dark for Naomi. “Maybe wait till she’s nine or ten,” she said. I figured that would hold for Harry Potter as well. I read those twenty years ago (all but the last book for whatever reason; I still want to find how it turns out) and recall them getting heavier as the series progresses. Maybe eleven or twelve?
But, then, children’s books are fraught for all sorts of reasons. I’m sensitive to all the woke stuff. I get it. But I don’t have much patience for people shaming me about literature. And by “don’t have much,” I mean “have less than none.” Is Little House on the Prairie problematic? Sure. Is it worth reading? Obviously. Same with countless other children’s classics. Where’s the line? I guess I’ll find it when I’m reading to my child and have to explain things. I think that’s what they used to call parenting.
Several books I’ve already mentioned are people’s hit lists today. “The Indian In The Cupboard,” says Angel Shaw at Screen Rant, “perpetuates harmful stereotypes.” Harry Potter? “Modern society has deemed several elements of Harry Potter problematic,” says Shaw, apparently speaking on behalf of us all. “House elves, who are enslaved by wizarding kind (but like it), are a problem for obvious reasons, while goblins, who greedily hoard gold and run the wizarding bank, are said to carry antisemitic themes.”
Writing a piece in Medium, Eliza Bachard disapproves of Harry Potter as well. While she gives the supposed antisemitism a pass, she highlights “the slavery. . . . It’s messed up,” and adds “fatphobia” to its roster of sins.
It doesn’t end there. Harry Potter receives double censure from both Shaw and Bachard because of its author’s politics. “Rowling’s comments against transgender-inclusive legislature [sic] have only added to the controversy,” says Shaw. And Rowling’s transphobia is enough for Bachard “to want to stay away from her and her books and her IP for the rest of my life.”
The inability to separate art from the artist is a perennial problem. Last year Naomi and I read through a pile of Roald Dahl novels and loved every minute. Oops. Shaw singles out the “minstrel influence on the Oompa Loompa’s singing and dancing, and the frequent descriptions of the ‘fat’ Augustus Gloop have begun to make some readers uncomfortable today as well.” Dahl himself smoothed out some wrinkles in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in the early 1970s. Thank God, sensitivity readers and editors have recently helped clean up the rest of the atrocities.
But Dahl’s real sins go beyond his creations; some refuse to read Fantastic Mr. Fox because Dahl was antisemitic. That’s a choice. But even his illustrator, the great Quentin Blake, could separate the man from his work. “I probably disagreed with everything he thought,” said Blake. Somehow we’re not allowed the same freedom? It’s not like George’s Marvelous Medicine is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in disguise. The idea is almost as comical as Dahl’s stories.
Personally, I see no reason to bring authors’ politics or morals or whatever else into consideration of their art. Maybe it’s meaningful to some, but it’s largely irrelevant to whether my daughter and I will enjoy a good story.
That leaves the content of the story itself, and here I think the scolds also overstep. Shaw flags Bridge to Terabithia for dated gender messaging and Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club because the girls are too young to be babysitting. Groan. It’s a story. It’s make believe. Who’s to say imaginary twelve-year-olds can’t babysit imaginary babies? This sort of tsk-tsking dissolves into self-parody.
Pharisaism, puritanism—whatever you want to call it—ranks among our species’ more annoying qualities. And it entirely misses the point of reading with children. The Guardian recently reviewed Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s new book, A British Childhood: How Our Children Live Now. Writes Joe Moran,
Cottrell-Boyce does not think of reading as a moral education. Some of the best-loved tales in the Arabian Nights, he points out, revel in lying, cheating and selfish ambition. One of the most famous, the tale of Abu Hasan, is about a fart. Lots of lullabies depict babies being killed or stolen. Frank L Baum [sic], the author of The Wizard of Oz, was an apologist for the genocide of Native Americans; Roald Dahl was a committed antisemite.
But such critiques misunderstand what’s going on when a parent shares a book with a child. Reading is about relating. “It has little to do with the content of a book,” says Moran, “and everything to do with creating a moment of shared attention and mutual noticing.” He then floats the line, “pedagogy of the sofa,” a pet phrase of June O’Sullivan and the London Early Years Foundation.
I find that bit as beautiful as I do endearing because now we’re back to parenting—guiding, leading, loving a child by sharing something of value and showing them how to evaluate.
If you find something objectionable in a book, welcome to books. Call it out if it makes sense to do so. I inserted myself into a few passages of The Indian in the Cupboard—for instance, when the boys are watching a western with Little Bear and Boone—to let Naomi know what was going on and why the scene played out the way it did. She’s learning how to judge; the book offered me a good moment to help her along.
Then, as she reads more on her own, when she graduates to reading chapter books all by her lonesome, she’ll be ready to bring her own moral sense to the page, more astute for all the times she’s done it with me. And now I’m wondering if I might push up that date for A Wrinkle in Time.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, please hit the ❤️ below, restack, and share it with your friends (especially if they’re interested in children’s lit and irked by censoriousness).
Not a subscriber? Take a moment and sign up. Free subscribers get two-week access to all new posts. Paid subscribers get access to the full archive, going back to 2022, plus an exclusive member chat and monthly member calls.
If you enjoyed this take, check out 👇
For context, I grew up in a majority-minority county populated largely by the descendants of slaves. My mother was quite literary and regularly read to us: one favorite was T. S. Eliot's *Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats* (1939). Another favorite was a book of Brer Rabbit animal fables collected by Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908). So you and your readers have to imagine this: a middle-class white woman (and gifted mimic) reading aloud to her children, in something of a caricature of African-American dialect, and during the Civil Rights Era, the story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby in the brier patch. I strongly suspect that scene will make some of your readers uncomfortable, even if a case can be made that the original folktales on which Harris based his adaptations were patently subversive with respect to white supremacy and oppression.
Do the stories we read our children contain the seeds of their own critique? I wonder why that can't be the main criterion. Put differently, don't read your kids garbage, and rest easy that you're doing the right thing.
Parenting through reading. That's a beautiful thing.