Like many of you, I’d imagine, I grew up listening to Raffi Cavoukian, the Egyptian-born Canadian children’s musician singing songs like “Baby Beluga” and “Down By The Bay”—I even have dim memories of going to see him in concert. He’s recently embarked on his first tour in ten years, and now, as both a Canadian and an advocate for children, he’s speaking out about the suicide of Rehtaeh Parsons, who hanged herself at 17 after she experienced bullying and social isolation after she was allegedly sexually assaulted and a picture of the assault distributed online—and about rape culture more broadly.

In a series of tweets today, Raffi wrote:

EDITORIAL: Anti-bullying efforts fall short | Chronicle Herald thech.ca/XFFire via @chronicleherald yes. quite an understatement.

— Raffi Cavoukian (@Raffi_RC) April 11, 2013

Father of Rehtaeh Parsons speaks out in emotional blog post soa.li/EWegwsU | NS Justice Minister Ross Landry should resign.

— Raffi Cavoukian (@Raffi_RC) April 11, 2013

“rape culture”? what has society become—who tolerates such violence & hideous insult to human dignity? men—SPEAK OUT! it’s way past time.

— Raffi Cavoukian (@Raffi_RC) April 11, 2013

The idea that men have a role to play in reducing sexual assault isn’t new, of course. But there’s something particularly powerful about hearing Raffi, who’s both an advocate for children and someone whose music has always been predicated on the theory that children have the ability to absorb big ideas about the world and their place in it, say that rape culture is unacceptable. If we’re going to teach boys more actively about gender roles and respectful and consensual sexuality, that’s a process that’s going to require a foundation to be constructed fairly early in childhood. That’s not to say that we need to start sex education at five. But if we’re going teach boys about the huge range of things they can be in the same way we’ve reexamined roles and options for girls, and if we’re going to try to shift the perception of what values make a person a real man, someone like Raffi, who knows how to speak to children directly and uncondescendingly, will need to be part of the conversation.

A new Pokémon game is out and PETA, being who and what they are, have launched an inept parody campaign against it. In this case, it’s particularly grating, as the Pokémon series they’re talking about raises some legitimately troubling issues about the way culture handles those of us with staunch views about animal rights.

In the first Pokémon: Black And White (the new game is a sequel), one of the villains is a kid who, raised among abused pokémon, launches a campaign to end the captivity of the creatures and the practice of forcing them to participate in glorified dogfights. The mantra of his organization is “Pokémon liberation,” a pretty clear reference to the most famous modern text on animal rights. The player character, by contrast, spends the game convincing this character that “slavery is OK if we’re not bad masters.” Moreover, the movement gets hijacked by a self-interested subordinate, who reveals the idea of Pokémon liberation was a stalking horse for a plot to take over the world from the get-go.

In short, the animal rights movement is a sham; anyone who legitimately believes the way we treat animals is immoral is a dupe for powerful, nefarious interests. You can see why that might be troubling.

There’s a danger in taking this too seriously; Pokémon is a sorta brainless kids game (that I unconditionally loved at age 12). But at the same time, it’s part and parcel of a broader culture that makes the use and abuse of animals normative at a very young age. Thoroughgoing animal welfare supporters are a distinct minority in the United States; using veganism/vegetarianism rates as a proxy for a more broadly animal-friendly lifestyle, only about seven percent of the American population qualify. As a consequence, concern about animal welfare isn’t exactly well represented in American public life; quite the opposite. Politicians sneer at concern for animals; spectacles like dogfighting and cockfighting are sadly common despite being criminalized. Even some things that may seem like advancements, like the cancellation of horseracing drama Luck after the death of three stunt-horses, remind us of the underlying brutality in the extant, legal horseracing industry.

The pervasiveness of the use and abuse of animals for human pleasure creates a particularly tough environment for parents who want to raise their kids with similar values. Kids aren’t critical consumers; they’re apt to treat accept inhumane spectacles like dogracing or mass consumption of factory-farmed meat as normal. These elements of American culture are unproblematic for most and hence quite pervasive once you start looking for them. Teaching children to abhor these forms of animal cruelty is fraught in all the ways familiar to parents who want to instill pride in difference in the face of normalizing pressures.

So it’s grating when a popular kids title goes out of its way to marginalize animal welfare advocates. Is it the end of the world? Hardly. But Pokémon’s casually violent message isn’t something that should be dismissed as a consequence of a PETA stunt; it should be treated as indicative of the broader cultural difficulties that parents face in an animal-using world.

I was sorry to read yesterday the news that Donald J. Sobol, the creator of the iconic children’s book character Encyclopedia Brown, had died at 87. Created in 1963, Encyclopedia and his best friend and detective agency business partner Sally Kimball were terrific models models of genre-busting characters— Encyclopedia is smart rather than a fighter, while Sally is effectively a ten-year-old action hero—and wonderful illustrations of the pleasures of exercising intellect and strength.

One of the things that the Encyclopedia Brown books do that’s somewhat rare in children’s stories is give us a hero who understands how the world reacts to his extraordinariness. The stories are always careful to point out that while Encyclopedia helps his father, the chief of police, solve mysteries, his assistance is a closely held family secret, on the grounds that Encyclopedia’s assistance might seem implausible or open him to resentment for ridicule. It’s not that Encyclopedia is pretending to be dumb, but he is aware that his intellect can be a way of alienating people rather than bring him closer. In one story, in which little old ladies ask him for help on their crossword puzzles, we learn that “He always waited a moment. He wanted to be helpful. But he was afraid that people might not like him if he answered their questions too quickly and sounded too smart.” And certainly bully Bugs Meany’s enmity for Encyclopedia is rooted in a dislike of his intelligence, the fact that Encyclopedia’s living a life governed not by the rules of kid-land, but by his ability to function in the adult world.

But even though the stories are cautionary, they’re full of feedback loops that emphasize the pleasure of using your brain. Every story ends with a teaser that encourages the reader to spot what Encyclopedia did, too, a mechanism that lets you feel the satisfaction of noticing what others don’t. Even if the book can’t fully immerse you in Encyclopedia’s victories, that setup gives the reader direct access to at least some of his emotions. In the text itself, Encyclopedia’s wins give him access to all sorts of status, whether it’s the ability to do good in his community, the respect of his family, and a relationship with the most attractive girl in town precisely at the time when such friendships between boys and girls are becoming fraught and complicated.

And oh to be Sally Kimball, whose looks are always mentioned in the context of her physical prowess, as in “Sally was the prettiest girl in the fifth grade and the best athlete.” She’s a constant combatant of Bugs Meany, who “would have liked to get even with Encyclopedia by punching him in the eye four or five times. But he didn’t dare—for two reasons. The first reason was the quick left fist of pretty, ten-year-old Sally Kimball. The second reason was Sally’s right. It was evenq uicker than her left. One day Sally had seen Bugs bullying a Cub Scout. ‘Stop it!’ she had creid, hopping off her bike. ‘Go powder your nose,’ Bugs had jeered. Zam went Sally’s right.” Watching Sally stand up not just to Bugs, who is a jerk, but to the idea that she should pack away her strength at a certain age and go be pretty instead, is a delight. And as much as Sally champions Encyclopedia, he gives back to her, too, as in stories where he realizes that a boy has been staging fake fights to impress Sally. Maybe their friendship will last into high school. Maybe it will falter, or turn into something else entirely. But I love the idea of a boy and girl who have each other’s backs against both immediate threats to their town and to more insidious threats to the idea that they should value their own best qualities.

I was fascinated to read Deborah Weisgall’s essay on Little Women, Louisa May Alcott’s, in part because she says that when she went back to the novel as an adult, “I did not recognize the story I was reading”:

What happens is fierce: Jo burns off half of Meg’s bangs when she tries to frizz her hair with a curling iron, just before a party—a party organized, like the one that opens Pride and Prejudice, to introduce eligible girls and boys. But Austen’s Bennett sisters accept as a given that looks and fortune get husbands; such a crass assessment of their marketability outrages the Marches. Next, because Jo has not invited her to the theater, Amy burns Jo’s manuscript, stories that Jo had been working on for years. Jo, in retaliation, lets Amy skate on the river without warning her that the ice is thin. Amy falls through, and Jo barely manages to rescue her. Then Jo cuts off and sells her own glorious hair—the only beautiful part of her—to buy her mother a present. Beth is pathologically shy and hardly leaves the house for fear of having to talk to people. When Laurie’s tutor declares his love for Meg, everyone is thrilled but Jo, who is bereft at the imminent dissolution of her family. She understands the heartbreak inherent in marriage and in the separation, the growing apart—and possibly the growing objectivity—that marks the end of childhood.

That pain and ferocity are part of why I liked the novels in the first place: I sobbed at the movie theater when Beth (Claire Danes) died, but Little Women was one of the first novels I read where a girl was allowed to be outraged, to be genuinely uncomfortable in her own station and her own skin. Jo March is not just the heroine of literary little girls everywhere, but of ones whose clothes don’t seem to do for them what other girls’ do, whose attempts to iron their hair result in cinders and who make do at parties, who are simmeringly angry, and often uncomfortable in their own skin and the conventions they live in. When her sister Amy, a pretty, socially successful little girl, burns Jo’s manuscript after Jo has been invited to a play and Amy excluded from the invitation, the act is such a violation because Amy is invading the territory where Jo is queen. Jo goes on to write other works, but the book Amy destroys is lost to Jo, and to us, forever. Jo’s temper is presented as dangerous, but it’s also a vital life force, the thing that propels her out of her small town outside of Boston to work in New York, where she’s exposed to new people and new ideas, and ultimately to the man who will become her husband.

And yes, it’s a novel about compromise, but also about growth. The March girls begin the novel with their castles in the air, their dreams for their future, but grow up to be women who understand that, as Megan Draper’s mother put it to her in the finale of this season of Mad Men: “The world could not support that many ballerinas.” It’s not that they’re crushed—their dreams evolve. Jo March, who spent her girlhood escaping into worlds of her own invention through her fiction, becomes a woman who constructs an alternate reality in the real world, through her school for boys and girls at Plumfield. Amy, who despite her ruin of Jo’s work had artistic ambitions of her own, ultimately becomes a patron rather than a full-time artist herself, though she continues to sculpt. Meg, who wanted nothing more to be a wife, ends up a mother to two remarkable children, and in the novel’s sequel, Little Men, is widowed early, becoming the accidentally independent woman Jo always planned to be. Little Women is a fierce novel because that’s what required to stand up to the uncertainty of life and to adapt rather than be crushed by it.

“I am angry nearly every day of my life,” Mrs. March tells Jo in the novel, explaining to her daughter that she’s tried to control and transmute her anger rather than to give in to it. Being a woman, it turns out, is a lot like being Bruce Banner.

“I got hit in the mirror,” eleven-year-old Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) tells Sam, a Khaki Scout, when they meet in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. “I lost my temper at myself.” The movie, an exploration of an island off the coast of New England and the people who live there, is a mirror picking up all sorts of flashes and themes from Anderson’s work. But it’s also a reflection that’s kinder to one of Anderson’s earlier characters than Suzy is to herself: Moonrise Kingdom is, to a certain extent, a story about a young Margot Tenenbaum.

Anderson’s live-action movies are obsessed with children who have lost their parents, whether to death or misadventure. In Rushmore, private school boy Max Fischer is motherless, and renders his true father non-existent with lies and exaggerations. Margot Tenenbaum is adopted, the source of her discontent in The Royal Tenenbaums, while her childhood neighbor and grown-up lover Eli Cash wants to replace his family with hers. Steve Zissou, the narcissistic oceanic explorer in The Life Acquatic is the reverse, a parent who has lost his child only to be found out by the young man. The brothers in The Darjeeling Limited are mourning the death of their father.

Moonrise Kingdom features a real orphan and a metaphorical one. Sam (Jared Gilman), a Khaki Scout whose flight from summer camp mobilizes the residents of a New England island to search for him, is living in a large foster home, a fact that’s evaded Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton), who is supposed to be looking after him. Suzy, the doll in this particular Andersonian dollhouse, down to her matching dress and saddle shoes, which are color-coordinated to her house and school bus stop, is lost in her own family. The discover of a volume entitled Coping With the Very Troubled Child on top of the refrigerator is one of the reasons Suzy decided to make a break for it, heading off into the woods with Sam armed with a portable record player and a collection of young adult novels (“Usually I prefer a girl hero,” she explains to Sam, “but not always.”).
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I was incredibly sad to read this morning of the death of Maurice Sendak at 83. It’s hard to imagine that anyone here hasn’t encountered Where The Wild Things Are, whether as the object of a reading of Sendak’s most enduring classic, a reader of it to a child in your life, or even only through the strange, wonderful in its own right, movie adaptation of the book. But Where The Wild Things Are was only part of Sendak’s legacy: as both a writer of his own work and an illustrator for others, he brought new worlds to life and made our own seem a marvelous, even miraculous place.

One of the reasons Sendak’s work is so enduring is that it treats children like children rather than turning them into tiny adults, and captures the real sense of fear and smallness that children often experience. Max enjoys his time with the Wild Things because it lets him flout his mother’s rules, but the intensity of their emotions and the thought of being responsible for them is intimidating. The supper his mother’s kept waiting for him seems a feeble light to drive back the darkness, but it’s enough. Small certainties, which children are still sussing out even if their parents think they’ve been clear, can defeat amorphous terrors. Outside Over There, in which a girl rescues the baby sister she’s been caring for from goblins, is also about being overwhelmed by responsibility and a sense of parental abandonment. In The Night Kitchen may be a perpetual subject of controversy, but it also captures how unsettling our dreams can be, particularly at a time when we aren’t yet experts in our waking world.

Sendak lent his skills as an illustrator to other authors as well, among them Dutch children’s author Meindert De Jong, poet Randall Jarrell, and Ruth Krauss. Whether he was illustrating a young girl’s effort to lure a stork to her village or helping Krauss bring the natural world to life, Sendak made huge contributions to creating the visual world of children’s literature. Whether they know it or not, Sendak is the first artist many children are repeatedly exposed to.

And as a gay man and a Jew, Sendak was particularly aware of how frightening the world could be, even after children grow up and grow into adult power and responsibility. Though it’s a later work, I’ve always particularly loved Sendak and Tony Kushner’s collaboration on Brundibar, an adaptation of a children’s opera first performed in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The story, about children who team up to chase a wicked organ grinder out of the town square so they can sing to raise the money to pay a doctor to attend to their sick father, is both an anti-Hitler allegory and in keeping with Sendak’s view of children as confronters of a large and sometimes frightening world. The opera’s survival is also a testament to the power of art in arming children for that fight, as fitting a summary of Sendak’s work as I could imagine.

Jan Berenstain, who co-wrote the Berenstain Bears books with her husband Stan, has died at 88. The books are probably best characterized as a gentler, more lesson-oriented version of The Simpsons with a bumbling dad, an efficient mom, an oldest-child brother and a feisty sister—they can be a bit didactic. But Sister Bear, who Stan and Jan added to the franchise so girls would have a character to relate to, is basically the jock version of Lisa Simpson, whether she’s slugging her brother one shortly after she’s born, infiltrating a dopey boys’ clubhouse, or winning road races and killing it at baseball.

Hilariously, the books drove Charles Krauthammer nuts. In 1989, he described Papa Bear as “post-feminist…The Alan Alda of grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman” and said that Mother Bear was so irritating she was “the one you always dreamt of drowning,” which is a pretty creepy reaction to an organized woman who watches her cholesterol. He acknowledged that the kinds of companies that put out the books “put in question my most basic political principles, since I cannot deny that socialism, whatever its faults, does not permit such things.”

Lou Dobbs’ temper tantrum over a slick, corporatized version of Dr. Seuss’s classic environmental children’s book The Lorax and the Studio Ghibli movie The Secret World of Arrietty must be seen to be believed:

Now, let’s be clear about the source material for both of these movies. The Lorax is hardly an anti-business tract: in the picture book, a factory owner called the Once-ler, starts a business that requires him to cut down a certain kind of tree to make a product called a Thneed. The Lorax, who speaks for the animals and plants who are harmed by the Once-ler’s logging activities and his factory’s pollution, warns the Once-ler repeatedly about the impact of his actions, but he ignores them. The ultimate result? An environmental collapse that depopulates the land, and wrecks the Once-ler’s business because he’s run out of trees to support his production and didn’t plant any more. If anything, the book argues that the interests of the environment and industry go hand in hand. That holds true for the movie, too—among the products that are being cross-promoted in connection with it is an SUV.

The Secret World of Arrietty is based on Mary Norton’s fantasy series about tiny people who live in the houses of ordinary humans, which starts with the book, The Borrowers, which since it was first published in 1952 is probably not a direct agent of the Occupy movement, unless Ms. Norton had a crystal ball working for her or something. It is true, though, that the book is based on the idea that “human beans” have more than enough to satisfy them and can spare the occasional piece of doll furniture or fibers from a door mat that the Borrowers can repurpose to make their own lives better. But the book suggests a model that looks a lot more like voluntary charitable giving than forced distribution or an endorsement of theft by the underprivilged.

But the lesson here is less that Dobbs is reaching to make his case in this particular instance. It’s how desperate conservatives are to marginalize some totally reasonable ideas. You can see this sort of thinking in the paranoid argument that bike lanes are part of a United Nations plot to control American communities or the extreme reaction to taxation. These are the sorts of arguments people turn to when they’re out of good, rational ideas to put up against something they just don’t want to happen, because it makes them angry or uncomfortable.

David Roberts unleashes a righteous rant on the disaster that looks like it will be a new adaptation of The Lorax:

While I agree with a lot of David’s criticism, including of the transition of the Lorax to a comedic figure, the personification of evil in a way that doesn’t require collective blame, and the insult to children’s intelligence, but I’d be curious to hear his thoughts on a couple of questions.

1) Collective responsibility is an important principle, but isn’t identifying specific villains also sometimes necessary? As with the financial crisis, there’s space between the “we’re all to blame” perspective and the “Bernie Madoff is the sole villain” view that’s pervading popular culture. Someone like Don Blankenship is uniquely evil, and worth calling out specifically, both for his environmental degradation of the Appalachians and for his disgusting record of disdain for his workers’ rights and safety. Does it make sense to draw general principals from specific examples, to illustrate a web of environmental interconnectedness? Villains can be a hook, rather than a distraction.

2) When it comes to kids, what should our asks or action items be? Getting children to start making responsible choices when it comes to sustainability, reusability, and the environment is important, but when they don’t have that much consuming power, what should the message be? I don’t think the overall framing of the movie is brilliant, but the idea that it wants to communicate a sense of wonder about a natural world kids may take for granted is not a bad one.

3) How do we draw the balance between respecting children’s intelligence and overwhelming them? If I read The Lorax to a young child, I’m not sure I’d expect them to get the argument that the vanished trees are an anchor species for the ecosystem. Instead, I’d focus on a sense of wonder and inherent value for the trees themselves. But if anyone here has a better grasp of early childhood education and elementary learning than I do, I’d be curious as to your thoughts on when these kinds of concepts are likely to stick and how we achieve that balance. At the end of the day, this is a mass market entertainment. I’m eager to respect children and young adults, and deeply appreciative of fiction that does. But I think the best tends to work at different levels for readers of different ages and often to reward re-reading, so I’m curious as to where folks thinks we might most productively aim certain messages.