Examining "Appropriate" Children's Books, and the Problems They Present

            The article “How Book Banning Marginalizes Children” shows just how unwilling people are to teach children about prominent issues that, while challenging, are essential for their education. Ringel writes that the main problem with these works is “diverse content,” which is essentially anything featuring queer or multicultural characters and beliefs. While concerning, this prompted me to look into “appropriate works” and the hypocrisy that they demonstrate.  

The National Health Institute defines childhood as 3-11 years old, so I looked at books in this age range using suggested reading lists on the Barnes & Noble website for ages 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. The 3-5 year range has books like Phil Rosenthal’s Just Try It!, a story about trying new foods and Marcus Cutler’s I Do Not Eat Children, a bedtime story about monsters who are not actually evil. Books for this age range seem to revolve around these themes; they are designed for kids who might have trouble sleeping or eating, and help parents who have kids that refuse to do either.  

The 6-8 featured a series familiar to me, that perfectly highlights the points that Ringel makes in the article. The Magic Treehouse follows two siblings who use their treehouse to go on adventures throughout time and space, sometimes to real places, sometimes to fantastical ones. While all about exploration and learning, its characters only go to American or European places. The website for the series (magictreehouse.com) lists all 39 books in the series, of which only one features a person of color on the cover. There are only two books set in Asia, one about ninjas and the other about a fictional Chinese emperor who, ironically, burns books as a central plot point of the story.  

One notable entry in the series is The Magic Treehouse: Civil War on Sunday, in which the characters learn about slavery, and how the South’s refusal to end it led to the American Civil War. It does not describe the physical or sexual abuse of American slavery, but it discusses the horrific act of buying and selling of human beings. While these books agree with Ringel’s point that children’s books tend to lack diversity, they are an exception to how “children’s stories and magazines during the 19th century rarely discussed slavery.” That being said, I did not have time to read anything beyond online summaries of a few of these books, and it seems that the aforementioned Civil War on Sunday is the only one that has themes addressing race. These stories are in no way groundbreaking exceptions to the topics of children’s books, but they show promise in some regards, as well as a way to go in others. 

Books in the 9-12 age range featured Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, and works by the familiar Raina Telgemeier. These stories feature a lot more action, and introduce romantic elements. All three series have been challenged within the United States for various reasons; some have pushed for the first two series to be banned on account of their sequences of violence and their character’s use of mischief to accomplish their goals, and, as discussed in class, Telgemeier’s Drama was challenged for “sexually explicit themes,” which consisted of two boys kissing. I mention this because I grew up loving Harry Potter and Percy Jackson, and I can say with certainty that they feature the same extent of sexual content (if you can even call it that) as Drama except that it is strictly between heterosexual couples. There is no problem with the books that show straight couples, and their reviews do not warn parents about having to talk with their kids about what it means to be straight. Books that feature relationships seem to have no problems if the couples are heterosexual, but anything else is immediately met with criticism and hate. 

Young children’s literature helps kids fight bad habits, some works for older kids introduce readers to heavier social issues, but rather poorly, and the books intended for the oldest age range of children feature romance but only in the heterosexual sense. To Ringel’s point, there is a lack of racial diversity in these books; a vast majority of the covers show only white characters, and there are more featuring animals on the front than there are showing people of color. Publishing has a long way to go to show proper representation for both different races and sexualities, and this is clear from the books that we give to our children.