Why I’m Reading My Boy the Books I Grew Up With
Sean W. Malone | AI Generated
As a new father, I’ve started reading children’s books again for the first time in decades—lots of them.
Many are some of the favorites that I grew up with like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, Nimby: An Extraordinary Cloud Who Meets a Remarkable Friend, or The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, along with older books my mother saved or that I’ve picked up from thrift stores like Peter Rabbit, The Poky Little Puppy, and Mother Goose.
I’ve also been checking out newer books every time I happen across them (typically at Walmart or local bookstores) and comparing them to the older works meant for small children.
The difference between the new and old books is striking.
At the most basic level, the older books just feel denser. More words per page. Longer sentences. Actual character development and coherent plot structures. You can’t just flip through them—you have to actually sit with them for a little while, which I think is a great way to help my boy slowly learn how to focus, sit “still” (he’s less than a year old and he just figured out how to stand up and climb all over me, so we’re grading on a curve at this point), and eventually learn to read on his own.
But the modern books I’ve been finding are entirely different.
They’re much shorter and far less complex. In many cases, the text feels like it’s there as an afterthought at best, mostly just to support the illustrations rather than carry the story, and the illustrations aren’t even very good most of the time, either.
You can quantify some of this. Picture books today are often in the range of 300 to 800 words, with many publishers aiming closer to 500 or less. Board books for younger kids are frequently under 100 words.
By contrast, the mid-century children’s books I mostly grew up with in the 1980s and 90s—Little Golden Books, for example—were often well over 1,000 words, sometimes pushing 1,500, with far more text packed onto each page.
My First Book of the Planets by Elizabeth Winthrop (1985)
And it’s not just length. The writing itself is far worse than it used to be.
Older books are more likely to use full, multi-clause sentences. Modern books tend toward shorter constructions, simpler phrasing, and fewer ideas per page. This hasn’t been a minor or insignificant shift. It’s a substantial reduction in how much language a child is exposed to in a single sitting.
There are a few theories for why this change has been happening.
Books today are competing with an array of different “screens”—phones, tablets, computers, TVs, video games—so it’s at least somewhat plausible that publishers are sensitive to that competition and try to make their books more accessible for people with lower and lower attention spans. Undoubtedly, this is also a reflection of consumer demand. Many parents want something quick to read at bedtime since their attention is just as fragmented as their kids’ attention spans.
But once you notice the structural differences, it’s hard to miss the deeper problem: Modern books aren’t teaching kids very good lessons about much of anything.
The older books tend to assume that the child is still becoming something.
Take The Little Engine That Could. The famous line—“I think I can”—isn’t telling the child they’re already sufficient exactly as they are. It’s a statement of effort in the face of personal limitations.
The whole story is about pushing through difficulty. The lesson is that even if you can’t do something at first, and even if you aren’t sure you can do it at all, you should try your best to persevere, and eventually you might surprise yourself. As a bonus, there’s a tremendous amount of real self-esteem and genuine pride that comes from accomplishing difficult things, and it’s never too early to help kids experience (and understand) the joy of seeing their own hard work pay off. The Little Engine That Could embodies that idea in a way few modern books I’ve found seem to do.
Or consider The Poky Little Puppy (1,139 words), which I mentioned earlier.
The titular character in that story keeps disobeying his mom, dawdling around long past his curfew when he should be headed home. Instead of getting praised for his “independence” or for “being himself” (as I suspect a modern writer would have done), the poky puppy comes home late and doesn’t get any dessert.
The lesson is simple, but important: Bad behavior has real consequences. If you want the reward, you have to earn it.
Or, let’s take a look at Curious George (the cartoon version of which is playing on a loop in our pediatrician’s office waiting room every time we go to an appointment).
In those stories, George’s curiosity routinely leads to chaos, and the plot lines are usually about the fallout from that chaos. Our cute little monkey friend never really intends any harm, but his actions inconvenience other people (most especially the Man in the Yellow Hat) since somebody else needs to clean up whatever mess he caused.
Curious George Gets a Medal by H. A. Rey (1957 | 11,750 words)
George gets into trouble, and the world pushes back. Just like in real life.
Even something as gentle as Make Way for Ducklings (1941, ~18,000 words) presents a structured world. The ducklings have to learn how to move through it safely. There are rules and systems that the child needs to understand. There are people who know what they’re doing.
Across these books, the pattern is consistent. The child is not the center of the universe. The world exists independently of them. They have to learn how to operate within it. That requires effort, correction, and, at times, restraint.
Now compare that with a number of modern bestsellers.
In I Am Enough by Grace Myers, the central message is that you are already perfect exactly as you are.
In The Wonderful Things You Will Be by Emily Winfield Martin, the emphasis is on celebrating whatever identity or path the child might take, with very little attention paid to limits or discipline or if that “identity” is even sane or real.
In Julián Is a Mermaid by Jessica Love, self-expression is affirmed and validated, and any tension in the story resolves through acceptance rather than correction.
And in Antiracist Baby by Ibram X. Kendi, abstract (and highly contentious) political concepts are introduced at an age when most children are still learning basic language and social norms. It’s more propaganda and an attempt at manipulation than an actual story.
These books are not identical, and some are better than others. But the center of gravity has shifted. The dominant message is no longer about growth into something. It’s about affirmation of what already is.
You see this in the way conflict is handled. In older stories, conflict often ends with some form of adjustment—learning, discipline, changed behavior. In many modern stories, conflict dissolves once the character is recognized and affirmed.
You see it in how authority is treated. Older books tend to assume that adults know more than children and that this matters. Newer books are more ambivalent. Authority is softened, sidelined, or absent.
You see it in how effort is framed. In older books, effort is not only unavoidable, it’s also an integral and laudable part of growth. In newer ones, it’s often secondary to self-expression. In some cases, it’s denigrated as unnecessary or unimportant. The world should cater to you and validate you, after all. You shouldn’t have to do anything to achieve your goals or work on improving yourself.
I don’t think any of this happened in a vacuum.
Part of it is obviously economic. Shorter books are cheaper to produce and ship, and they’re often easier to sell.
Part of it comes from changes in education. There’s been a long movement toward reducing friction in learning—making things more accessible, more comfortable, less demanding—and our education system is far more interested in the kinds of modern themes we see in these books than they are in teaching kids that growth requires discomfort and pushing yourself to be better than you are now.
But I think that a significant part of it comes from a broader cultural shift toward political activism and therapeutic language. The idea is that the primary job of any interaction with a child is to affirm, validate, and protect their sense of self. That language has moved out of therapy offices and into classrooms, media, and children’s books.
Layered on top of that is a more explicit ideological current. Publishing is not immune to it. Many contemporary books are built around frameworks of identity, politics, and social messaging that would have been largely absent—or at least far less direct—in earlier generations of children’s literature.
Some of that is thoughtful. Some of it is heavy-handed. Either way, it changes what kinds of stories get told.
And all of this matters, because children’s books are not neutral.
They shape how kids think about:
whether effort is necessary
whether (and under what conditions) authority is legitimate
whether failure is something to overcome or avoid
whether they are expected to grow or simply to be affirmed
If a child is told, over and over again, that everything about them is already perfect, it raises an obvious question: what, exactly, are they supposed to work on?
Confidence built on that foundation is fragile. It has nowhere to go when it encounters reality. The moment a child who grew up with this mentality experiences genuine failure or criticism, they experience it as a hurtful personal attack, not as an opportunity for learning and growth.
None of this means that every modern children’s book should be thrown out. There are certainly still a few good ones being written.
But it does mean parents should pay close attention to what their children are reading or listening to. It’s perfectly okay and normal for you as a parent to decide that a given book simply isn’t good enough for your kids.
As I’ve gone through this process, I’ve found myself returning to older books more often—not simply because they’re old, but because they seem to take children more seriously.
They assume kids can handle more language, more structure, more complexity, more discomfort, and more truth.
And more often than not, they’re right.
