Some children’s books

[namechange10022002]

So today I went to the only bookshop in my town looking for some books for my kids and I was quite dismayed to see how many books about gender ideology there were in the (very small) kids’ section.

The content was as I expected. Your body is not important, it’s how you feel inside that counts. There was also stuff like “Some boys like to play with girls’ toys. Should they be made to feel bad for it? No!” Which I totally agree with. But then going to suggest they are not “real” boys and must therefore be girls.

I despair. My kids start school next year and I have no idea how I’m going to steer them through all the regressive gender bullshit they’ll inevitably be taught.

I wouldn’t be happy about that. Was it a chain store?

No it’s not a chain. It’s just annoying that kids are exposed to so much of this stuff.

My daughter is 12 now but i always remember her first books and they were the “MR Men” books and “Little Misses” books.

The books are just amazing.

There are a ton of books now for very small kids with bizarre topics, totally developmentally inappropriate.

I mean at the board book level.

Libraries buy them because they think it counts in some sense towards inclusivity.

And when I first saw many of them advertised, I thought they were jokes, that people would get for adults as gag gifts. Apparently not.

There were also board books about White Privilege which to me is just baffling. My kids aren’t even aware of race yet (and we are a very mixed family). I feel like it’s better not to make a thing of it unless they ask about it.

Your body is not important? Wow that's quite the message to teach children.

The publishing industry, and particularly children’s and teen books are completely captured. It’s full of youngish, privileged women, who are not only on board with transactivism, but are actively looking for transactivist books and authors. It’s interesting, because I can imagine teens and tweens buying that stuff, but it would astonish me if parents of toddlers bought them in large numbers. If librarians buy them, I guess they’ll be getting those sales. I only hope that, with the changing scenery within medicine, this will pass sooner rather than later.

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

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

It’s not. It continues like this…

WTF does it mean to “feel like a girl”?

Also discusses the importance of using people’s preferred pronouns.

I wish people could just teach kids that some people are different but everyone deserves respect without making it all about some mystical gender identity that we all supposedly have.

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 🤷‍♀️

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.

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.

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

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!

I’ve been a specialist children’s bookseller, worked in publishing and taught in schools as an English teacher so I am (or was) pretty clued up about children’s books and fostering a love of reading, etc. That’s not an issue. The problem is now that we live overseas we have a very limited choice of books at our local bookshop unless we use Amazon. And as a PP said, once they go to school, who knows what kind of books they’ll have access to.

We’re in N.America now where kids’ books with a moral message seem to be more popular even though in my opinion, kids don’t really like them!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@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