Everything Happened | vol. 232

Kid stuff I approve of lately, part I

We are Little Feminists books series (and also the OG, Global Babies)

A certain group of people are way too approving of you having a girl. Like, it’s weird. Maybe it’s because my friends and I started having kids squarely in the girlboss era but we are way too attached to daughters as totems of what we’ve given up on in ourselves. When I hear people brag about more spirited and spunky qualities of their daughters, I usually hear what they want me to see in them, the mother. I’m spirited. I’m spunky. She’s me.

And when girls are naturally timid, or tidy, or drawn to quiet play and princess worship, I’ve watched a certain type of white feminist mother get concerned. I actually think it makes a lot of sense that, for example, a six-year-old child would be timid regardless of gender! The world is terrifying! Timidity seems a reasonable mode in the face of such horrors! We don’t have to make it weird. I will cop to feeling annoyed that my second-born, a girl, is way more cautious, sedentary, and reserved than my son. She’s being exactly who she is! But there I am, with the binary and its lazy categories breathing down my neck.

HBO’s Girls

Boy children are ok as long as they are sensitive, “gentle,” or bravely interested in traditionally feminine things. If they are not these things, we can make up for it by constantly apologizing for them existing.

While I’m alienating everyone with my rude takes, I will say this as well: I think much of the progressive children’s book industry is a cynical cash-grab aimed at nervous parents to perform thoughtfulness for themselves and others. When you have a kid in the mid-2010s, do you know how many copies of “A is for Activist” you will receive? Enough to re-gift several times over at showers for your friends and become part of the problem.

That book aside (which has beautiful illustrations and is not really my point tbh), it is so rare for this genre of book to have a compelling story. Kids know when we are lecturing them! How else to put it: These books aren’t good, usually! They exist so that when your child-free friends come over, they encounter these titles on the shelf and find your disgusting lifestyle choice to be slightly more acceptable.

Ok, so then my second child was a girl and I became aware of the entire oeuvre of ham-fisted “feminist” board books. We received some that were so odious in their vision of “girl power” that I am not convinced they are not somehow a far-right psy-op.

But Evie, they’re for babies and toddlers. Who cares?

Ok, so the BABIES aren’t the ones doing the READING?? It is I who has to say the words OUT LOUD with my OWN VOICE, the same one I use to tell my children important things such as “I love you” and “not in the street” and “get your finger out of your nose.” Do I want to dilute my authority by saying “Cleopatra said girls rule!” Not really!!!!!!!

All that to say, when Polly received a Christmas gift of a set of board book called “We are Little Feminists” from my sister, I clenched slightly. My sister is cool and incredibly thoughtful, and she even works at a library and thinks about literature and its audiences for a living. But there was no way this book series wasn’t going to give me a stress nosebleed right?

Wrong. I love this book series. The different volumes are Families, How We Eat, On the Go, Celebrations, and Hair. Nice full-color photographs and simple text that show the diversity of experiences we can have together. A pregnant trans man, an intergenerational family. A child being tube-fed by his brother, families that eat their cultural food with their hands. Wheelchair users, kids who use a vent. A kid with locs, a kid with allopecia. An iftar meal, a quinceañera. My toddler wanted to flip through all the pages over and over again and my big kids sat with her as she paged through it and asked me questions.

It was an opportunity to have the type of conversations about differences that you always hope to have before your kid says something loud and embarrassing in public. The kinds of conversations that allow them to push back against prejudice they might hear from their peers. And going through these books together wasn’t “eating vegetables,” it was dessert. The pictures are so warm and loving. Babies love pictures of babies and kids! She has brought these books to me to read to her over and over again.

The format reminded me of one of my favorite board books we got when Desi was born, the classic “Global Babies.”

I love this book and my babies have always loved this book. Again, babies are huge fans of babies. Nick and I both get misty reading this because over the last 8.5 years of our mutual parenthood, there has always been at least one global humanitarian crisis where babies and children and imperiled and dying!!! Not great. (Here is a link for the Palestinain Children’s Relief Fund.)

Buy these books for your pregnant friends with full confidence. Everything Happened seal of approval.

I was going to write about a bunch of other kid things that I approve of, but then I had too much children’s lit induced heartburn, apparently, so more to come.

yr mate,
Evie
###