Some children’s books

I started to looking for children's books to research the past couple years and was really shocked to see the identity politics seeping into the culture in this way. I don't have a problem with the LGBT community but it seems like children are being sexualized and/or being exposed to innuendo younger and younger

I've found the trend for highly simplistic illustrations interesting. I think maybe it started because people thought babies could see them better, but it has moved to older kids. But they often don't prefer them, they like stories where there is significant detail in the pictures.

I agree about the emotions thing, and it goes beyond that. There is a real trend to books about emotions, anxiety, etc for older children and teens too. It's no wonder they are all obsessed with their inner life.

My favorite children's book as a child was A Story About Ping, and my kids all loved it too. Great illustrations, an interesting setting, some complex emotional resonances and ethical questions, none of which are explained or which require a parent to explain, they are integrated into a compelling narrative.

I'm pretty sure it wouldn't get published today though.

Watch out for books about puberty - I'm just about to return a book I ordered about periods which manages to avoid using the words women or girls. Apparently people of different genders have a womb and ovaries.

That's a truly awful story.

But being transgender is definitely, definitely not about stereotypes.

Ooh yes Winnie was another favourite. My daughter is autistic so trying to help her with emotions was useful. She only understood happy or angry. I was trying to teach her that we have a range of emotions and they are all okay. Even anger is okay.
My other daughter's all time favourite book when she was little was Little Miss Scatterbrain, we still refer to it now and she is 14!

I've found it to be part of a wider problem where new children's books for the three to six age group seem very focused on moods, emotions and feelings to the point where it is a bit strange.

I discovered my daughter didn't really understand the concepts at all because they were exploring emotional experiences that her age group don't really have: like a consciousness of being "a boring person" or "hating their hair".

The pictures aren't interesting enough either. There's not enough detail.

We were given a huge stack of second-hand Winnie the Witch books and my five year old loves them to pieces.

Personally, I think Winnie is a wonderful character for little girls. She's short sighted, middle aged, doesn't shave her legs, goes on holiday when she needs to, loves her friends and family and her cat, has a bonkers house, keeps up with technology, takes action to change things around her, and has experiences she learns from.

The other image didn't post. Here it is.

My daughter loved Hairy McClary books and the 'That's not my...' books. I'm a single mum and it was really hard to find a book with our kind of family. The closest I got was 'A chair for my mother'. We also had a few books All kinds of family which was a sweet rhyming book about objects that make families.
Todd Marrs books were good too. We liked the family one and feelings one. There was a roller skating bad ass mum in one of them which I insisted was me or it could have been a dancing crazy mum I can't remember now! This is all kids need at a young age.

One of my daughters loved secret seven but I did use it to show the inequalities. Poor Janet only ever being able to pour lemonade and hand out biscuits. Of course we talked about that was how it was back then and how great it is now she can do anything as a girl!

@namechange10022002 totally agree. I’m not teaching my child to see different skin colours. There are a range of ethnicities at his pre school and he has never commented on anyone being different and I’d like it to stay that white. My child is quarter Asian through his dad but has the features and skin tone

That doesn’t make any sense. There are millions of children’s books, far too many to fit into your shop. Only a tiny number are about gender identity. Stocking books that don’t mention it is a simple thing, just fill your shelves with better books.

My MiL bought us some Arabic children's books and I was really disappointed by how didactic and bland they are. It isinteresting that booking North America are similarly moralising.

I've also seen several really frustrating board books. The really thick cardboard ones for tiny babies. There's "A is for Activist" which is all about being a green anti-capitalist and the right kind of liberal. And also some feminist ones about Ada Lovelace etc. The content is so unsuitable for a baby. Just because you've put it on cardboard doesn't mean a baby can understand the images, let alone the words. Just because an older child can parrot back slogans, doesn't mean they understand the abstract concepts being expressed.

Gosh yes, the vast majority of them are such shit.

Highly moralistic in a very didactic way, and often with no real story, or a completely idiotic one that was obviously just meant to offer a frame for the moral message.

For all that children can have trouble with abstract concepts like race, they often are very capable of emotional and moral reasoning and recognize a compelling narrative.

It's like the books are flipped, devoid of narrative and nuance but containing abstractions that aren't meaningful for children.

Those of us at shop level get very little say in what we want to stock, and we definitely don’t have time to check the content of everything that comes in. We have a couple of Rachel Rooney’s books, so I’ll make sure to recommend those if I’m asked. But the fact that Rooney has turned her back on publishing now should give some indication that children’s publishers are well and truly captured, until that changes shops have limited options.

It's shit OP. But I can help with the "what does it feel like to be a girl?"
Goodnight Stories For Rebel Girls features, amongst actual fantastic women and girls, Coy.
Looks like the answer is sparkles, pink, shoes, clothes, cake and male entitlement.
Not a role model I want for my daughter.
I can't wait for this crap to fall from grace.

My Body is Me by Rachel Rooney is the antidote to this shit.

Indeed! Is there anything worse than being lectured by a book? Tedious in the extreme.

There are thousands and thousands of children's books available and still in print. There is no need to stock the gender issue ones if you don't want to. I am all for free speech but not in board books for goodness sake!

Oh crap. I thought her earlier posters were good. What a sexist idiot she is.

To be fair, shops CAN refuse to stock books - they do all the time! I am not saying they should ban them but it is not true that there are no alternatives! A lot of these books seem to be "bandwagon jumping" rather than actually being interesting or well written.

There are so many lovely children's books that will help them learn to read and encourage enjoyment of reading OP. The problem comes when they start school and you lose control, though personally (my children are young adults now so I recognise I won't come up against this and it could be difficult) but if I found any books about gender in their school bag for reading at home I'd be sending them back with a complaint and refuse to read them with my child.

We loved the Hairy Maclary books, funny and repeatable rhymes for them to chant. And Debbi Gliori is probably now viewed as appallingly cis heteronormative (bears) these days but we loved her Mr Bear books.

It's really grim how children's publishing seems to have woken up to the opportunity to indoctrinate from a young age. There is a whole genre relating to surrogacy and egg donation!!

Choose fun and easy reading to enjoy and encourage and give those books with a message a miss is my advice.

The shop I work in stocks some of this shite. I hate it. But please don’t blame the shop - we can only stock books that exist, and publishers keep churning this garbage out, while refusing to produce sensible books. And (depressingly) some of it sells. I would love to be able to recommend sensible books of this type, that don’t promote gender ideology, pronouns, etc … but if they’re not being published, I can’t 🤷‍♀️

Iirc the Elsie gravel one is anti gender ideology. It's about smashing stereotypes.

But agree it's hard to tell what's what