Allow me to get a little autobiographical here for a moment. I had a bit of a Baader-Meinhof experience reading the Abate that provoked some interesting questions for me, and they might be helpful to some of the discussions we’ve been having about childhood and children’s literature this semester.

I was alternately doing my reading and cleaning out an old bookshelf (thanks, Marie Kondo) when I fortuitously came across an old copy of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories I forgot I owned. I’ve had it since I was a kid, in fact, and I remember my mother buying it off the discount book table at Costco, chuckling through it on the way home, and giving it to me. I was about eleven when it came out and I had read “adult books” before, or tried to, struggling mightily with Michael Crichton in the wake of seeing Jurassic Park but plowing through my mother’s Stephen King and scrappy lady investigator mysteries. This book felt *very* adult though, because I knew I was supposed to understand both what it was saying to me and what it wasn’t saying to me, and how adults spoke to each other in order to get that something was going on.

I bring this up because my mother is an avowed Democrat, and yet she purchased Politically Correct Bedtime Stories and gave it to me. And while I haven’t looked at the book since then, what I took from it as a child was not an aversion to “political correctness,” but rather the sexist stupidity of fairy tales. In fact, I remembered this so clearly and was so convinced Abate’s reading of this book was wrong that I went back and flipped through it again, shocked to see it was of course a send-up of “P.C.” liberalism and not the subversive text I’d perceived it to be. What my mother got out of it I’m not sure, but she is a Democrat married to a blue-collar Republican, and they both read only the New York Daily News, never the New York Times. I suspect the thing my parents have in common is the thing she found funny here–a snickering disdain for things they find to be pointlessly pompous. (Dad’s a ball at MOMA.)

Anyway, my experience of Politically-Correct Bedtime Stories lead me down an interesting path–or really, down a series of questions–that ties the Raising Your Kids Right back to some of our other reading. As I was reading about The Book of Virtues and The Truax, I was preoccupied by the fuzzy model of conservative childhood I was getting from Abate’s work–it just wasn’t coming into focus for me. I’m not sure investigating this was the goal of her project because she seems to be working in a bit of a Kidd-like way, in that she uses a historical lens and selects certain works as case-studies to reveal larger themes. Her introduction is heavily historical, tracing the shape of the American conservative movement from the mid-20th century through the present, or the present when the book was written. At least in the chapters chosen for this week, her motive seems to be exploring moments in conservative children’s literature to reveal truths about conservatism, not necessarily what it does for children. I wish she had done more with this, though again I don’t think it was her goal–I wish it because it would be helpful for our class, and for my understanding of childhood studies.

What is the conservative idea (or ideal) of childhood, and what role do books play? I think Bennett’s Book of Virtues points to certain popular conceptions of Victorian childhood that Gubar has so graciously complicated for us, and also to a belief that a child absorbs what they are presented as-is. But if modern conservatism is characterized by traditionalism, an feeling that was “opposed to progressive social changes and promoted the status quo” [12], which the child is, I think, supposed to absorb through the simplified or sanitized moral tales in The Book of Virtues, how and when does that child also learn to question and push back against cultural change? How can political ideology be transmitted through a book to children who may, as I did with Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, take from it a completely different lesson?

Though this is a bit half-baked, I found myself reaching back to Bernstein and wondering whether or not we might be able to look at the children’s book itself as a scriptive thing to get at some of these concepts of childhood. An illustrated picturebook, for example, is meant to be touched and opened, enjoyed visually by the child alone but read in tandem with an adult who can decipher the print. Its script requires contact between adults and children to fully transmit the book’s contents. I’m wondering then about the particular scripts around The Book of Virtues, which at more than 800 pages a child might not even be able to lift for herself and which (from a quick glance inside the book on Amazon) contains almost no illustrations. Or the scripts surrounding the Truax, which, to a child who cannot yet read, might be indistinguishable from The Lorax. These two examples seem to bind together the child receiver to the adult transmitter of the children’s book particularly tightly, and I wonder if that isn’t something important to our understanding of conservative childhood–that one should hew closely to one’s elders.