From The Atlantic:
More than 200 years ago, when books for children first became common, they delivered simple moral lessons about, for instance, cleanliness and the importance of prayer. Today, story time is still propelled by moral forces, but the issues have gotten a good deal more sophisticated.
In recent years, publishers have put out children’s books with political undertones and activist calls to action on topics ranging from Islamophobia to race to gender identity to feminism. “The trend has definitely exploded in recent years with the social-justice books and the activism books,” says Claire Kirch, a senior correspondent at Publishers Weekly who has been covering the book industry for 15 years.
. . . .
For children of all ages, books about such charged topics are, in the words of one publishing executive, coming to be seen as more “retail-friendly.” This development applies all the way down to picture books—a category for which the intended audience and the buyers are two very different groups. In this sense, “woke” picture books can be thought of as products for parents, helping them distill some of the day’s most fraught cultural issues into little narrative lessons for their kids.
. . . .
The wave of politicized children’s books has come more from the left than from the right. Kirch told me that “of the three publishers that are the most well known for publishing conservative books”—Center Street, Sentinel, and Regnery Publishing—“only one really has a kids’-book line.” That one is Regnery, which has put out titles such as Donald Drains the Swamp!, Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride (by Newt Gingrich’s wife, Callista), The Remarkable Ronald Reagan, and The Night Santa Got Lost: How NORAD Saved Christmas.
It seems there is more of an appetite for liberal-minded kids’ books: Kirch noted that another Regnery title—Marlon Bundo’s A Day in the Life of the Vice President, by Mike Pence’s daughter Charlotte and told from the perspective of the family’s pet rabbit—was far outsold by a parody of the book overseen by John Oliver’s HBO show that imagined the titular bunny to be gay.
. . . .
Since then, the number of books featuring marginalized identities has increased. The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison examines thousands of books for kids and teens published each year, and in 2015, it found that about 14 percent of American kids’ titles were about people who weren’t white. In 2017, this figure rose to 25 percent. “We have found, however, that the increase in the number of books about people of color is due to an increase in white authors writing about diverse characters,” the Center’s director, KT Horning, told me. “It does not mean that we are seeing more books by people of color.” Even so, diversity—in children’s books and in so many other parts of society—is these days a politicized issue, and an increasing focus on it in children’s books is a development that scans to some as liberal.
. . . .
Laura Stoker, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, put it to me this way: “Kids know that they’re Democrats before they have any clue what a Democrat is.” Stoker thinks it’s possible that children’s books touching on politicized issues are representative of broader political polarization. “Parents who feel very strongly want to produce children who feel the way they feel and adopt their values,” she says.
Link to the rest at The Atlantic
While reading the OP, PG was inspired to create a new advertising slogan for Big Publishing – “By New Yorkers, For New Yorkers”.
Note the tacit and unexamined assumption that maintaining the status quo is not a political act.
Good point, Richard.
Also, I was wondering where all the Bible stories, books, coloring books and so forth fit into this argument?
For the sake of discussion: Are there more Biblical tales published for children or ‘liberal’ tales?
My guess is 10 Biblical tales for every ‘diverse’ or otherwise ‘liberal’ publication. Some of those are pretty ‘grim’ too, come to think of it.
So, just how strictly should Society keep children isolated from reality before they find out what the real world is like? Many are already so isolated that college is severe culture shock that requires ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings.’
American children are raised in a world full of imaginary beings, given awards they haven’t earned and cossetted like no generation before.
Yet the they are subject to unspeakable acts of violence at the hands of their own classmates…on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, children in other countries are working in sweatshops, or subject to other hardships that would kill a cossetted American child.
There’s a major cognitive disconnect going on in our Society.
PG, do you really think liberal values aren’t shared among writers everywhere (not just in New York)?
As for the article, I don’t see the topic of diversity as being political. Books for children that encourage acceptance of diversity are more in the category of “Love thy neighbor” than “Don’t grow up to be a conservative.”
Do you really think conservative values aren’t shared among writers everywhere (not just in New York)?
There has to be a happy medium between “Love thy neighbor” and “Get in the van with the creepy guy who says he has puppies.”
Not as long as people keep pretending there is only one set of good and proper values. Theirs.
First, people at large have to allow others the right to be “wrong” in peace.
Do you think that’s what I said?
“I don’t see the topic of diversity as being political.”
I agree.
Have we gotten to a place where the phrase ‘live and let live’ is no longer common sense, but a dog-whistle declaration of war to the ‘conservative’ minds of certain individuals?
Shall we talk about being ‘trigger happy’…another phrase that describes a lot ‘conservatives’ for some reason?
FWIW I haven’t seen any ‘liberals’ shooting up churches, killing people in Kroger, or shooting dancers in bars lately. They are too busy eating kale chips and worrying about diversity in children’s stories. (A healthier pursuit IMHO.)
If I have to choose between ‘pass me a kale chip’ and ‘pass me the ammo’ I’ll eat kale with the best of them.
FWIW I haven’t seen any ‘liberals’ shooting up churches, killing people in Kroger, or shooting dancers in bars lately.
James Hodgkinson
Okay. One out of a dozen or so.
But he didn’t kill anyone, did he?
Not for want of trying. (Steve Scalise’s survival was arguably a medical miracle.)
Gabby Gifford (D) was shot — and six bystanders died — because her attacker felt she wasn’t liberal enough.
“I don’t see the topic of diversity as being political.”
You should get out more. Get to know some people who think differently than you do. Get exposed to a diversity of views.
Yeah, I’ll make a point of getting out of my cave and meeting one or two people. Thanks for the guidance.
Dog whistles in politics:
“Dog-whistle politics is political messaging employing coded language that appears to mean one thing to the general population but has an additional, different, or more specific resonance for a targeted subgroup. The analogy is to a dog whistle, whose ultrasonic whistling sound is heard by dogs but inaudible to humans.”
“The term can be distinguished from “code words” used in some specialist professions, in that dog-whistling is specific to the political realm. The messaging referred to as the dog-whistle has an understandable meaning for a general audience, rather than being incomprehensible.”
It is up to every rational human to question our own reactions to certain words.
And thank God we have the guidance of the morally and intellectually superior to interpret the whistles and tell us exactly what our reactions are. They tell all of us. They know these things. They have the gift.
Has anyone here ever read the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales?
They were — er — very Grimm. But my sister read them to me, beheadings and all.
I find the modern children’s tales bland by comparison. Today’s comic books are better.
I’ll bet that kids prefer comic books too.
Sadly, you’d lose that bet. 🙁
Comic books today are too expensive for kids so they have to “make do” with the dozens of live action and animated comic book-derived TV series on the CW, FOX, ABC, HULU, A&E, HBO, PRIME, etc. With more to come on the DC UNIVERSE and Disney+ STREAMING services.
Plus movies.
Right now there’s 6-8 comic book “blockbuster” movies a year. Not all are obvious superhero fantasies so quite a few fly under the radar. There’s big money in comic book video.
More interesting to this crowd is the ongoing “flood” of Indie superhero prose on ebookstores. A typical KDP novel is cheaper than a single comic book “floppy”. A decidedly under-served niche that is booming under Indie, Inc.
That’s too bad. (That kids can’t afford comic books.) But there’s an awful lot of hours in every page.
The movies are okay, but they aren’t covering the decades of story-lines that are out there. I’m already bored with them.
I know a couple local comic/graphic artists and writers. I’ve always wanted to open a coffee shop where I could showcase our local writer/artist scene.
The economics of the business have changed dramatically over the last two decades.
The biggest problem is simply the size of the reading pool.
Today a “popular” series is one selling 25,000 copies a month. Or less.
The $4+ prices make that a profitable effort but it limits the reader pool. Not least in that the top sellers aren’t as kid friendly as they used to be in subject matter or in the serialized format.
Marvel seems to have been somewhat successful with their digital subscription service leveraging their 50+ year library but digital readers don’t help the economics of the floppies. DC’s hybrid subscription service might grow their reader pool since it offers both video and a subset of their full library in digital form at a lower price than marvel so folks subscribing for the video might get hooked on the comics but, again, pricing forecloses the kid market.
DC did try a biweekly format at $3 for a few years but they’re now at a monthly $4 list price.
When I was in my teens I could afford a dozen titles a month with my allowance. Today that would be north of $40. Even kids getting that kind of allowance are going to be hard pressed to justify that when they could be buying a dozen ebooks or subscribing to Netflix, Kindle Unlimited, XBOX GAME PASS, and Amazon Music and have money left over.
It’s a fading art form, unfortunately.
Comics used to cost ten cents. People had boxes of them stacked in basements and closets. Lots of those comics had prices less than a dime. A kid could read forever without ever parting with his dime. And if I still had even one of those boxes old Mr Mulane gave us one summer day…
The ten cent price of 1940-ish comics (64-80 pages) translates to $1.75 or so in today’s currency. Current floppies are only 32 pages but the paper and printing quality is significantly higher so that can be considered an offset.
The big difference is in sales volumes: hundreds of thousands to millions in the 40’s to tens of thousands today. That came gradually over decades along with the demographic shift in narrative focus. The big change came in the 90’s: in 1990, a typical floppy could still be had for $0.75 when straight inflation allowed for up to a buck. By 1995 the list price of a comparable title was $1.95, almost double the inflation adjusted price. (The same doubling-plus holds true today: the $0.75 comic of 1990 should be going for $1.45 if inflation alone were at play.)
Those five years featured a speculative bubble that almost destroyed the industry. It’s never recovered.
“It seems there is more of an appetite for liberal-minded kids’ books:”
Who has the appetite for them? The parents or the kids? Maybe the liberal parents like to buy them to make sure their children are properly indoctrinated by the thought-masters who have enslaved the minds of the parents, or maybe the parents are so simple-minded that they’re the ones reading the books because that’s the highest level they’re able to wrap their minds around. Or perhaps it is just that liberal ideas are most suited to being delivered at that grade level.
As opposed to bible studies, Sunday school and the other required indoctrination I was subject to as a child? And billions of other children for centuries?
It always strikes me as weird that parents have to crush their kids with indoctrination that match their beliefs instead of just teaching them to be a good person.
Bible studies, and Christianity more generally, are an inaliable part of American culture and life, whereas LGBT, racial equality and all that other nonsense is not.
So it’s perfectly reasonable to teach young children about the foundation of their society.
Or to put it another way, Bible studies might be what you consider indoctrination but it’s the right kind of indoctrination.
You are right, racial equality was not an inalienable foundation of American society. Plenty of biblical support for keeping slavery.
I’d ask how can it be the right doctrination when the majority of the US will be indoctrinated into the ‘wrong’ religion and damned to hell no matter which sub-sect of Christianity is right. Shouldn’t they be left indoctrinated so they can choose what they research as the right one without years of bias built in?
Bible studies, and Christianity more generally, are an inaliable part of American culture and life, whereas LGBT, racial equality and all that other nonsense is not.
Different ideas have varying levels of support in society. Some have enjoyed support for hundreds of years. Others are relatively new. Many of the ideas are contradictory and at odds with each other. But expression and advocacy of all those ideas is protected under the Constitution.
Those who favor LGBT rights and those who condemn them are both free to express and advocate for their ideas. We are also free to express ideas many consider nonsense or hate speech.
Some want to suppress expression of support for LGBT rights. Others want to suppress condemnation of LGBT rights. They are all free to express their displeasure and personal offense. But speakers have absolutely no obligation to avoid displeasing or offending anyone.
Each generation reinvents the cruelties of the past. Children’s literature is almost always designed to teach some lesson or another. There is nothing new about political correctness. Read some of the tripe Victorians inflicted on their children. Even Lewis Carroll, who often made fun of heavy handed children’s stories, has his strain of didactics. It’s only tolerable if you agree with it.
Oh, I disagree – these things are even more tolerable if you disagree with them, because then they are funny.
I remember very fondly reading my way through the historical childrens’ lit section at my alma mater. It contained:
– a book in which the father took his disobedient son for a picnic under the hanged body of a thief at the crossroads
– a book in which the daughter did not wear the glasses she needed, because her papa would disapprove
– a book in which the boarding-school girls decided to pursue chivalry and knightly virtue by forming their own chapter of the Ku Klux Klan
We cannot be too diligent in the moral formation of our youth.
You are right! Sometimes it is funny. But I was raised on Little Brown KoKo, and when I look at that book now, my stomach turns. My parents were not racist– they simply knew nothing about the larger world. But now, I am sometimes disgusted by the stuff inflicted on children, both in the past and the present.
The good news is these turgid titles will send kids right to sleep.
and in 2015, it found that about 14 percent of American kids’ titles were about people who weren’t white. In 2017, this figure rose to 25 percent.
Didn’t these very pages recently lament the lack of books about kids of preferred pigmentation?
And now we also find minimally pigmented authors are making money from them?
I’m surprised they allow this. We pink writers are told by others that there are too few characters of color and on the other side, we’re not allowed to write them. The horror!
Those on the right side of history realize the minimally pigmented are obliged to step aside, nurture the more pigmented, and allow more pigmented authors and characters to occupy a safe space. Benign neglect is not an option.
“While reading the OP, PG was inspired to create a new advertising slogan for Big Publishing – “By New Yorkers, For New Yorkers”.”
And the rest of the world doesn’t need to bother with or about them.
I still like those movies where they’d just turned NY (or at least NYC) into one big prison …
The indoctrination begins early, it seems, and once homosexuality is normalised in society know religious person will be safe.
They will run you down in their BMW’s while wearing fashionable scarves if you don’t keep an eye out.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004BA5EV0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
“Originally published in 1994, Politically Correct Bedtime Stories spent more than 60 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list, eventually hitting the #1 spot. Also a best seller in Canada and Great Britain, it has been translated into more than 25 languages and adapted numberless times for stage and radio. According to the Times of London: “It is beautiful. It demolishes, in few but elegant words, a dozen kinds of silliness. It is better than I can possibly convey.”
Only one thing was wrong with the original edition – the number of innocent trees that gave up their lives to print it. Now, with this 100% tree-free edition, readers can enjoy these classic bedtime stories in up-to-date, aggressively progressive versions without guilt, especially if their e-readers are solar-powered.
From Cinderella rejecting unrealistic ideas of feminine beauty, to the Three Little Pigs arming themselves and overthrowing their imperialist wolf oppressors, all right-minded people will feel comfortable reading these enlightened versions to their little pre-adults.
Plus, this new edition contains the long-suppressed waterfowl classic, The Duckling That Was Judged on Its Persunal Merits and Not on Its Physical Appearance!
As a bonus (but at the risk of sounding elitist and exclusionary), the new electronic version also contains previously unpublished material: the updated nursery rhymes of “A Child’s Garden of Political Correctness”; the story “A Royal Revenge” (commissioned and broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation for Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee in 2002); and the first chapter of James Finn Garner’s latest work, Honk Honk, My Darling: A Rex Koko, Private Clown Mystery. “