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Another holiday, another uncomfortable intrusion of the culture war by psychos into my child's life.
Maybe I was oblivious as a kid. I probably was. But somehow I don't remember children's books being as blatantly propagandized as now. Literally every single book my 3 year old daughter got for Christmas is either packed to the gills with LGBTQ "families" or interracial families mixed to a degree that I'm pretty sure is genetically impossible. Like I don't think White Woman + Latino Man = 1 Asian Child, 1 Black Child and 1 tan baby. We didn't set out for books with overt propaganda. We wanted books about nature, farming, the seasons, the months, learning to read, numbers, etc. And yet here we are.
And like I said, maybe I was oblivious as a kid. But then again, I actually got my daughter a lot of the classics I grew up with, and I still don't see it. Goodnight Moon, Where The Wild Things Are, The Hungry Caterpillar, etc still seem like straightforward children's books to me.
It's just baffling to me that books like that appear to be the default option when you tell family "We want books about X" and they search the internet for "Children's Books about X" and just click Buy on the first 5 results. We got like, 12 pseudo random children's books for Christmas, and not one single family in any of them looks like her, despite us being the majority demographic of our nation. It's one thing to be an adult, seeing the precise opposite of reality being crammed down your throat by our cultural overlords. You can by and large tune it out, thanks to the decades of actual life you've lived standing in opposition to pretend nonsense. There is something profoundly disturbing about watching them attempt to brainwash your child any which way they can into believing the world is the opposite of the way it is.
Ah well, Merry Christmas I guess. She liked the stool I built her, and although she balks at me reading the copy of the Hobbit I slipped in the drawer. Just not old enough for all those words without pictures yet.
I don't think there was any particular reason for this, but most of the children's books my parents read to me when I was a kid were from the early 20th century. They also read stuff from earlier and later periods. Why is the default to buy recently published books when it's all new to children anyway?
I mean, that's the problem. It's not in my mind. But it turns out, between my wife and myself, we remember a totally insufficient quantity of books to keep our kid entertained. And so the search for something new, or at least new to us, begins. And this search has been utterly ruined by SEO and good old fashioned media cartel behavior.
More or less every article you find on google about "Best X of Y", be it powertools, computer parts or children's books, looks like it was written by a chatbot sourcing the list from Amazon bestsellers and the attendant "user" reviews. In the case of powertools, this ends up with every top 10 list being full of the cheapest of chinesium desktop jointers. In the case of children's books, it's woke bullshit as far as the eye can see.
Well, don't use google you might say? Find a children's book review community. Why bother? My wife already suffered through the woke takeover of knitting, and I was around myself during the gamergate days and the fall of every community I previously enjoyed to ultra-woke moderation policies. Why after personally suffering those devastating losses of community, would I believe the first, second, third, forth and fifth community review site for children's books I come across to not also already be ultra-woke?
If I were religious, maybe I could rely on those institutions to pre-screen books for me. But we're not. And we both remember having weird religious neighbors and their thinly veiled religious polemics aimed at children. I guess it's better than the alternative, but we still feel adrift in a sea of info-hazards with zero way to navigate it.
I assume you've exhausted the list of Caldecott Medal books (older than 19xx)? That would seem like a place to start.
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