Daniel Zalewski writes about children’s picture books in this week’s New Yorker. “The kids are in charge,” he tells us, and today’s picture books are full of anxious, apologetic parents who resort to canned psychobabble in an effort to get their kids to behave: “Use your words,” “Hands are not for hitting,” “Is there a nicer way to say that?”
We live in a “confrontation-averse age of parenting,” he writes, but many picture books have a strong disciplinary edge, no doubt a legacy of all those 19th-century tales about children burning to death when they play with matches or wasting away when they fail to eat their soup.
Below Zalewski’s description of a picture book designed to discourage gluttony:
One of the latest catchphrases to infect parental discourse is an admonishment against greed. A child who demands more Goldfish crackers is told, “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.” (Despite the singsong rhyme, the phrase is rather grim—it could be a fragment from “The Collected Wisdom of Kim Jong Il.”) The precise origins of the phrase are elusive, but its surge in popularity—one can buy T-shirts emblazoned with it—derives from its inclusion in one of the more successful picture books of recent years, “Pinkalicious,” by Victoria and Elizabeth Kann (HarperCollins; $15.99).
“Pinkalicious” is a parable about gluttony. It begins, “It was a rainy day, too wet to go outside”—a limp echo of the couplet that opens “The Cat in the Hat” (1957). In Dr. Seuss’s book, disorder could reign only when the mother left the house, but in “Pinkalicious” anarchy erupts in full view of the parents. A little girl and her mother spend the rainy afternoon baking bright-pink cupcakes; the girl gobbles one after another, and in the throes of a sugar rush demands “more, more, more!” In Victoria Kann’s illustrations—computer-generated collages whose brittle sheen befits the protagonist—the girl swings upside down on a chandelier and sticks out her tongue.
The mother tries out the “You get what you get” line. Fans of the magic phrase seem to have forgotten that, in the book, it doesn’t work. “I got very upset,” the girl narrates. After a tantrum subsides, she is, inexplicably, given more cupcakes.
The next morning, the girl wakes up to discover that she is the color of “raspberry sorbet.” Thrilled, she anoints herself Pinkerella (and delights in her “pinktails”—again, this is not Dr. Seuss). Her mother, having “speed-dialed the pediatrician,” takes her to the doctor, who recommends a “steady diet of green food.” The girl’s reaction is, at least, direct: “YUCK!” After her parents go to bed, she steals some cupcakes that have been stashed atop the refrigerator, and turns fire-engine red. This hue not being to her princessy taste, she holds her nose and chokes down some vegetables; her skin regains its normal shade. By the final page, the girl has learned a lesson about healthy eating, and her parents have been thoroughly steamrolled.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/10/19/091019crat_atlarge_zalewski?currentPage=1
