Betty Birney’s Blog

Like many readers, my long love affair with books may have started with a Golden Book! How great to write my name in it … even if I still had trouble with my Ys. What Golden Book stands out in your memory? I know there’s at least one.

I was jarred when it dawned on me a little while back that many children aren’t being taught nursery rhymes and fairy tales any more. Stories and rhymes that have been passed on for hundreds of years and that have cultural significance may, indeed, die. Things change, of course. But why?

In this case, I think there are two reasons. One is that fairy tales and nursery rhymes were part of a verbal tradition that is definitely waning. Parents traditionally told these stories and taught them to their children, often without having a book to guide them. We all just knew them. Now, with both parents working and busy schedules, there’s less time for one-on-one entertainment. Videos can do the job. But that’s not the whole explanation for why fairy tales and nursery rhymes are endangered.

I think parents today find them too scary and creepy for their children. I certainly can’t argue with the creep factor. A girl is taking food to her grandmother and finds that she’s been eaten by a wolf. Two children are taken to the woods and deliberately abandoned – near a witch’s house. There are some very scary stepmothers out there and it’s possible to stay too long at the ball or the fair.

I enjoyed these stories and poems and never lost a moment’s sleep over them. Of course, it’s unsafe in the woods alone. Yes, there are bad people – some of them pretty witchy – out there. Don’t take candy from strangers – or eat their candy houses! These are cautionary tales.

Mother Goose has a different problem. The rhymes are just plain odd. Many nursery rhymes are thought to have been thinly veiled political satire. They have their own scary factor: humanoid eggs get smashed beyond repair, the ladybug’s home is on fire and her children are alone, and somebody killed Cock Robin. They also have a delicious sense of wonder: the cow jumps over the moon and the dish runs away with the spoon.

There’s a growing protectiveness among parents that wasn’t around when I was growing up. We didn’t slather on sunscreen except at the pool, we roamed the neighborhood for hours unchaperoned, we probably weren’t hydrated at all times. But we were protected in other ways: foul language and sexual content on TV were censored, people didn’t wear T-shirts with obscenities on them, certain “feminine” products weren’t advertised on T.V. There’s no possible way to protect children from growing up too fast today in a 24-hour news cycle.

(By the way, there were child molesters and kidnappers when I was growing up. Young as I was, I was aware of the Greenlease kidnapping everyone was talking about – particularly since I lived in St. Louis. I even recall a sick joke about it. My mother gave us the appropriate training about not going with strangers and she was very definite about it.)

Our old Mother Goose book is the most worn of all my children’s book – evidence of how much we loved it with its vivid illustrations. You can see the pencil numberings my sister put in. She was frustrated by the book’s lack of an index and so she numbered the rhymes and then matched them up with the alphabetical list of rhymes, so she could easily find her favorites. 

I chose the seesaw because that’s another thing that’s disappeared. I can’t argue that seesaws weren’t dangerous. I can argue that they were really fun. But part of the fun was slamming them down or trying to bounce the other person off. I never got hurt on one but I know there were occasionally smashed fingers. So they’ve disappeared from playgrounds along with merry-go-rounds (the kind you get spinning fast and then jump on), which were also great fun.

For more reading on children’s books, I recommend The Annotated Mother Goose, and the works of Iona and Peter Opie

Please feel free to discuss what I’ve said by adding comments. You can sign up to receive email notifications of new posts at http://groups.google.com/group/betty-birney-blog-readers

This is a book I actually owned, which means it must have been a gift. Most book gifts came from my paternal grandmother, from whom I inherited my love of books and playing piano. I loved the idea of this book more than the book. I liked the title, liked the illustrations but I don’t think I was crazy about the story.

Like the books in my last post, it has a lot of text. The only reason I’m including it in the post is that again, as with the previous books, there are triplets in it! Three identical girls. I’m only guessing that the Flicka, Dicka, Ricka and Snip, Snapp, Snurr books were so popular, triplets were “in.” Funny, because multiple births were less common than today. And they were always identical triplets, which I’m sure are very rare.

 I liked the triplets, I liked the puppy story in this book, but I wanted to like it more!

I’ll be signing books next Sunday, April 25, at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at UCLA. This is a wonderful annual event, the largest in the nation.

My times are:

11 am – Noon at Mrs. Nelson’s Toy and Bookshop Booth813

3:30-4:30 at CM School Supply Booth 839.

There are books to discover, shows to see, people to meet, stuff to eat – you name it – so come on over and say HI-HI-HI!

 I should take this excellent advice from England!

March madness: I’m not talking about basketball … I’m talking about living life like a hamster spinning on a hamster wheel!

What have I been doing lately?

1) answering fan mail
2) writing and rewriting Humphrey book 7
3)answering fan mail
4) writing and rewriting the first of the younger Humphrey books, aimed at kids 5-7
5)answering fan mail
6)negotiating with agents and lawyers on two potential TV series (one Humphrey, one not)
7)dealing with ridiculous time-devouring tech problems with my Blackberry (finally healed) and printer (finally healed)
8)neglecting everything else, like fun, friends and family

I’m HAPPY-HAPPY-HAPPY that Humphrey makes so many people HAPPY-HAPPY-HAPPY. But I still haven’t found that balance.

I miss my travels to schools throughout the country, but I traveled so much over the past few years that I’m only now getting used to the fact that it’s Sunday and I don’t have to catch a plane! I recently drove a friend to Burbank airport on a Sunday afternoon and I was amazed to think that I wasn’t the one getting on a plane. However, I will be traveling to the UK in August/September and next March and that makes me unsqueakably happy.

Okay, so I have nothing to complain about. I need to mind my head!