t’s true that some popular picture books do seem to have a suburban setting: Victoria Kann’s Pinkalicious series (2006-), the Berenstain Bears series (1962-) by the Berenstain family, and Norman Bridwell’s Clifford the Big Red Dog (1963-) come to mind. But these books also come to mind when I consider books I’d rather burn than read – not because they take place in the suburbs but because they’re so poorly written and illustrated. My only claim here is that the best children’s books forgo suburbia.
Just thinking about my kids' favorites of late and the Ladybug Girl series is set in exurbia and Mac B Kid Spy is set in suburban California when he's not flying off to England and elsewhere in the service of the Queen of England.
He also counts the Curious George books as being not suburban, which might be true of the original series, but there's a reboot by different authors that has a suburban feel. George drives around in a car, and goes to places like a pancake breakfast and a chocolate factory that don't seem to be in Brooklyn. These books aren't great, but my son likes them, as well as most of the other books that this article has committed to the flames.
The Margaret and H. A. Rey books are frequently not urban as well. There was one where George borrows a pump from a nearby farm to try to clean up the mess he made with ink. There is no consistent geography in the books.
This is a pretty sweeping generalization. The suburb I grew up in was and still is plenty walkable (though it is admittedly even more bikeable/driveable) and has plenty of places for kids to have adventures. Of course, I've definitely been to many suburbs that are completely unwalkable by design, but not every suburb is like that.
(My sense is that more recently-built suburbs tend to be more heavily designed around a presumption of car ownership, but that's just based on my own experience.)
> The suburb I grew up in was and still is plenty walkable
I think on HN a lot of the urbanites think of suburbia as an endless sea of cookie-cutter houses on nondescript, seemingly identical streets. Nothing but houses for as far as you can see.
That certainly exists in some places, I'm sure. But some of us grew up in places like Portland, Oregon, which is essentially one big suburban city (sure, there is an urban core, but it's tiny). Lots of single family houses, but lots of retail, industrial, and office space intermixed. Very walkable in most areas.
I think a lot of the break down of suburban discussion happens because of this. There's a pretty wide range of perception based on different life experience.
Portland isn't a big city but it is a city. An urb, not a suburb. Portland actually has suburbs of its own. It has so many suburbs that they're ranked by someone who does that kind of thing (not that I vouch for the rankings):
Aside from a few blocks north of downtown on the west side of the Willamette River, Portland is entirely suburban, by my definition at least. Single family houses dominate outside of that small urban core.
Outside of Portland you could say there are suburbs, but many of them are just towns themselves that blend into Portland as the area has grown. E.g. Oregon City, which is older than Portland but might now be considered a suburb.
This just doesn't strike me as true at all. Most of my children's books have very non-descript settings that begin in non-connected single family houses. But regardless of that framing, so many of my kids' books dive into the realm of the protagonist's imagination.
This honestly just sounds like another indirect shot taken at suburban life. I get it, internet content writers disproportionately live in the big cities, but to quote the Dude, this is just like, your opinion, man.
Yeah. I'm not convinced settings for kids books really tell us more about urban planning than they tell us about the the problem with not enough political situations being solved by encounters with handsome princes these days. And I'm pretty sure that well established story tropes predate suburbanism and republicanism is more of a factor in the popularity of certain types of fantastical settings than magic kingdoms full of trolls being more walkable than the cul-de-sacs kids often grow up in.
It doesn't help that the author acknowledges that there are in fact numerous kids' books set in suburbs, he just doesn't like them very much. :D
The children's books actually show hansome princes very rarely. Those are featured in traditional stories, m but most children's books in bookstore are decisively not that.
What you call well established story tropes is not actual content of actual children's books.
It seems to me that children's stories have actually changed quite drastically over the years and between cultures and countries. I read my child many old children's stories (say, published between 1930-1960 in northern Europe) and they are scarier and more fantastical and more.. earthy. Lots more casual death and violence between imaginary animals. One reason I keep reading them is that they are interesting and I think they provide better life lessons: now that I'm an adult, I read one somewhat violent tale of a little girl being led astray by a wolf or something (not quite Little Red Riding Hood but something like it) and I was like, wow, this is quite a sophisticated little story describing and naming grooming behavior that leads to child exploitation! This is actually useful, unlike (so many others).
Modern children's books often seem to be written as psychotherapy for adults. For instance, one children's book my kid loves is supposed to have as a lesson that being together with friends is the best thing and we should live in community, but most of what my kid has taken from it is that the protagonist penguin has the most fun while doing stuff alone and yelling "I can do it myself!" It's a pleasant enough book but I think the old stories of danger and foxes and rabbits and bears will stick more. They're all about houses on the edge of the forest... does that count as the suburbs?
You gotta be careful with interpreting the old stories. Many of them were not meant for 5 years old crowd. I honestly never thought about Red Riding Hood as grooming story.
I personally prefered new stories to my children. When they were small, the traditional ones were too long for their attentention span and my patience. And when they were older, it kind of turned out we find them more fun.
Anyway, we liked Hilda comic the most. You might like it, or definitely did not led to psychotherapy feeling.
I understand JK Rowling's bestselling Ickabog has progressed to a character spurning the affections of the king in favour of a handsome Prime Minister ;)
But I don't think there's much room for disagreement that princes and princesses are overrepresented in children's literature (and entertainment in general) relative to other forms of government, and that this tells us precisely nothing about these systems' respective merits. Similarly, I don't think characters in various types of children's books being likely to live in a wood, on the moon or against an unexplained primary coloured background tells us much about merits such environments might have over suburbs.
Most of my childhood books were rural based adventures. The books my kid has are mostly rural or have no setting at all.
I agree that stories involving houses tend to portray single family homes. I can't think of any that actually portray that house in a suburban setting (the premise of the article). I'm sure they are out there, but none come to mind for me.
Then the question is really, so what if the settings are not suburban? I didn't really see an answer to that in the article, so I guess they were just trying to point out that there may be fewer topics for childhood adventures set in suburban areas.
My favorite children's book growing up (the embarrassingly named Captain Underpants) was definitively suburban.
More generally, I guess I'd question what it means to portray a house as suburban. The author seems to be assuming that anywhere with cool nature stuff in walking distance is rural, and that's not true; my definitively suburban house growing up was within easy walking distance of a pretty well-forested park on one side and a creek on the other.
That was also my biggest problem with this article. Take Calvin and Hobbes—definitely Calvin lives in a suburban environment, but he also has plenty of nature nearby. Would the author consider this rural then? I don’t know, but I don’t think it was.
Looking at the bookshelf at preschool books, and only including ones with children, I see two :Pirates next door" books, both starting in "Dull-on-sea, a gloomy seaside town", and some Alfie books (where Mum takes him to various locations where he has magical adventures - diving into a swimming pool and being abducted by pirates, been driven to school but it's actually and alien school, etc)
I don't get this hate at suburbs either, unless it's by 30-somethings that love their city lives but now want kids and are trying to convince everyone that the city is the best place. If you think that, that's fine, plenty want space and open air.
There does seem to be an issue with American suburbs though. Every suburb in the UK I can think of has pavements down the side of every road, has a primary school within walking distance, a secondary school in biking distance, a bus stop within half a mile. Indeed there are specific limits like "distance to supermarket", "distance to postbox", etc which come into the planning process.
We also have a National Planning Policy Framework, which states things like
give priority to pedestrian and cycle movements, and have access to high quality public transport facilities
and
create safe and secure layouts which minimise conflicts between traffic and cyclists or pedestrians, avoiding street clutter and where appropriate establishing home zones
New developments have to provide appropriate public open space in them, the larger the development, the more space, but as a rule of thumb a development of 400 houses will have a large multi use game area (basket ball, 5-a-side soccer, etc), playground, and an acre of two of informal green space, far more than in a city or town centre.
There's nothing wrong with suburbs, just how they are implemented.
Also, if you change that to "children's shows" instead of "children's books", most of them are set in something resembling a suburb: Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol, Bubble Guppies, etc. Sesame Street is a notable exception.
It's always bothered me that the local government of Adventure Bay chose to outsource pretty much all municipal services to a ten year old boy and his back of trained dogs.
Bubble Guppies routinely has weird consequences of choosing their cast and setting to be mer-people but that premise being incredibly restrictive to a long running show.
They float and swim around like fish yet somehow they have scenes that will involve something like gathering around the ol' underwater campfire or they'll be "at the beach" and you see their air bubbles floating up, yet you also see waves lapping up on the sand or them build a sandcastle. Or the episode featuring the town fire department and they teach fire safety. They also had an episode where they adopted a puppy. Not a mer-puppy, just a regular dog that would drown shown next to the clearly-just-a-fish teacher Mr. Grouper. Or the episode about _air_planes. Nevermind that the show is clearly tries for an ocean theme most of the time and guppies are a freshwater fish.
I'm glad my kids are aging out of this nonsense. At least Mr. Rogers spoke to kids like real people with emotions and intelligence instead of just assuming they're too stupid to recognize massive internal-inconsistencies.
As someone who shares your dislike of Bubble Guppies and also has very positive feelings about my childhood of watching Mr. Rogers, I must say I've been very impressed with the Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood. It does a very good job of framing issues faced by children (anger, jealousy, fear, etc.) in a realistic ways and teaching them coping mechanisms.
I'm sure the parent poster is familiar with it, but figured I'd throw out a good word for any current or future HN parents of young children who might be on the lookout for something better than the average drivel the passes for children's TV.
Kids don't care about internal inconsistencies. Frankly, neither do many adults (see: practically all Marvel movies)
The show is pretty educational - kids learn about sharing, professions, sing songs about the universe, go on crazy adventures, etc. Mr. Rogers was great in a time when the word was much slower, but now a kids show in 2020 needs lots of pizazz to keep a child's attention.
(I can't believe I'm debating Bubble Guppies on HN)
Don't be dissing on Mr Rogers, my friend. The show still keeps the attention of modern kids just as well as it did in the 70s, 80s and 90s. My kids would point to the picture of Mr Rogers on the back of their Daniel Tiger books and ask to watch him.
I never caught that juxtaposition. I wonder if it was intentional or coincidental.
Mr. Rogers also transitions between small town America and a (walkable) fantasy kingdom with a street car connecting the two. Again ... probably doesn't mean anything.
Agreed. The article uses a very cliche American suburb stereotype as if it is representative of suburbs, but ignores the fact that suburb life has more to offer than soccer mom stuff.
Look at Calvin and Hobbes for a good example of a great deal of memorable stuff happening in a clearly suburban setting. A lot of primary/secondary school geared books, especially those geared towards girls, are set in suburban neighborhoods and schools.
Outside of American culture, you can see a lot of suburban themed stories. For example, many school-themed mangas happen in suburbs.
The Brazilian comic Monica's gang is another good example of stories happening primarily with kids hanging around a suburban neighborhood.
If reading the tea leaves about urban planning is the game, then it's also cherry picking.
How come kids are totally disinterested in cars? Oh wait, they're not disinterested in cars. There's a popular series of movies called Cars, and kids' toys include endless variations of cars like remote controlled cars and collections of miniature cars. When playing, kids will happily make vroom vroom noises and simulate car jumps and stunts and crashes, but I have never seen children's play involving the scenario of walking to a restaurant instead of driving there.
I feel the same way. As a city kid, I always felt left out because almost everything in US culture is based on the big suburban 'American Dream' home or, less often, rural life. I remember only being able to relate with Sesame Street because, gasp, people lived in apartments and hung out on city blocks with other kids just like I did! Kids books were a mixed bag, but definitely had more city representation than TV or movies.
On a more practical and aesthetic level, drawing cobblestone streets, cozy neighborhood stores, hand carved sandstone facade apartment buildings, etc is a lot more glamourous than drawing tract suburban housing, so I can see the appeal of it aesthetically. Also from what I've read about some of these authors, they were city people as well, so they just drew what they knew. The migration of the middle class to the suburbs didn't happen until many of these authors were well retired, so if kids are reading the more classic books, they'll see a bit more city life than usual and almost exclusively NYC where so many budding creatives had access to NYC's incredible publishing industry.
Lastly, kids can't drive. So if you want a kid having an adventure where he meets various storekeeps, neighbors out running errands, friends, pet stores, schools, etc then a walkable city makes the most sense. Walkable areas are just more communal and neighborly than suburban life as well. Its more realistic if a kid goes on an adventure in a city than in the suburbs were the only practical way around is being driven around. Bikes, less so, when the nearest store is 5+ miles away and there's no bike lanes. I also imagine parents are more comfortable with books not encouraging little kids to ride bikes in the street. As a parent, my recollection is that a lot of the books exist in a weird nebulous middle ground unless they outright take place in NYC or London or Paris for narrative reasons. Kids can walk through a urban downtown area with stores and neighbors but also end up in big suburban houses on big suburban streets in the same book and without taking a bus or a cab between either. So its probably hard to really divide this into city vs suburban if we want to be fair about it. Authors will do whatever fits their narrative. The walkable city is appealing but so is the big home, so why not have both?
> Its more realistic if a kid goes on an adventure in a city than in the suburbs were the only practical way around is being driven around.
As a kids who grew up in a few different suburbs in 2 different countries, I'd challenge that assertion. We had tons of adventures, visited a lot of cool places, and did a lot of exploring (on our own), all within a few miles of our homes. We'd ride out bikes to the liquor store / arcade / cemetery / 7-11 / park / community center / museum etc. When younger, we'd have to get off and push out bikes back up the hill the last few blocks sometimes (I lived on a very steep hillside).
Nothing about living in the 'burbs precludes adventure...
Why do so few events that shape your life or are worthy of mention take place in the suburbs, a place where people mostly sleep/rest?
This reminds me of "liquid networks" from Steven Johnson's book "Where Good Ideas Come From". Here's a talk where he addresses it briefly, timestamped at the moment he starts talking about "liquid network"[0]
Things worth telling mostly happen in cities, or the internet.
I grew up in suburbs, I went to school in suburbs. I met my wife in the suburbs, I had my first kiss in the suburbs. I definitely had some formative events that occurred on the mid-90s Internet, and would not be the person I am today without it.
But I for damn sure also wouldn't be the person I am today if I hadn't rode my bike to my friends' houses to trade floppy disks or watch Schwarzenegger films, or sneaked out to the mall to meet folks, or hung out at the neighborhood strip-mall comic shop and picked up various CCGs and RPGs.
> Why do so few events that shape your life or are worthy of mention take place in the suburbs, a place where people mostly sleep/rest?
Your idea of a suburb and mine are apparently quite different. I live my entire life here. Buying food, going to work, going out to eat, going to concerts, meeting friends, etc. Why would I only eat & sleep here? Hell, if anything, it's the downtown core that gets quiet at night as all the businesses shut down and along with them about half the restaurants.
Let me put on my cognitive neuroscience hat. It's because the market for children's books is parents. And parents want a sentimental cognitive effect when reading to their kids (the article mentions 'romanticization' which in cognitive terms is sentimental feelings). I don't know many parents who have sentimental feelings for their upbringings in the suburbs, mainly because by the time they learned what the concept of the 'suburb' is, they were probably entering high school, which is to say, they were entering miniature delayed adulthood, while having to navigate a completely artificial political sphere (high school). That being said I'm sure its a fine story world and captain underpants has certainly done a great job with it.
So the article addresses its own question and the answer is children’s stories require walking because it’s children and the suburbs aren’t generally walkable (or interestingly walkable) environments.
There Is No Such Thing As A Dragon by Jack Kent (1974, I think?) has a clearly suburban setting visible when the kid’s dragon cum house on wheels relocates in chase of a bread truck.
I think that's a function of american suburbs. It's rural round here which isn't really walkable (narrow country lanes with poor visibility).
Suburbs where I live are very walkable, with footpath on both sides of the road, and typically plenty of traffic calming. Rare to be more than a mile to a school for under 11s, maybe 2-4 miles to high school, half a mile at most to a bus stop.
I grew up in a suburb. As kids, we found plenty to do, often involving places where we weren't supposed to be. The nature of suburbia as boring didn't even occur to us until we were teenagers, and then it led to adventures that can't be portrayed in children's books.
I agree. I was trying to think of what a suburban story would look like. The cities have things like museums or the zoo. The country has natural things to explore. The suburbs are basically a bunch of houses with yards - not a lot of opportunity for childhood adventure stories.
Really? I grew up in a rural area and the suburbs always seemed like fun, you know why? There were other kids! Is this just an illusion? All I ever wanted as a kid was a neighborhood. We had to convince our parents to drive us all over hill and dale if we wanted to see anyone our age.
I guess it depends in the demographics and location. I grew up in both settings.
In the rural area I could ride my bike or walk to friends houses, but there were really only 2 that were in range. There were tons of activity options - bike trails, fishing, exploring the woods, model rockets, etc.
Then in a small town setting, there were more kids, but not as many options for stuff to do. You would need to drive places for many outdoor activities, such as the fishing, mountain biking, model rockets, etc. So the activities were more indoor, which was still stuff I could do rurally, like video games (well rural couldn't do online, just in-person), board games, etc.
That's funny--I grew up in a suburb and always wanted to be somewhere else. I didn't want to read books about places like the one I was already in. (I now live not far from where my great-grandparents lived when they first came to this country, so I guess I made a big loop).
In the suburbs if you're not old enough to drive your "adventures" mostly consist of meeting at someone's house and doing house things. So yes, there are other kids to interact with, but not much of an environment in which to interact with them.
Seems like most things kids want to do just require yards or houses and other kids.
Before you can drive I think the main factor for how much fun your environment is (assuming safety and no poverty) is the density of kids your age in the neighborhood.
Kids do what is available. And kids are definitely able to use more then just yard.
Yard gets boring when you are like 6. Then the kids either have bigger space to bike, explore, play actual hide and seek where they can actually hide etc .... or move all activities inside typically toward videogames.
I live in a lower middle class suburban neighborhood with about 600 homes. My kids have the following, within walking distance of their home: two neighborhood swimming pools, three parks, three schools (two public, one private) two convenience stores, two drug stores, a small department store, and a pizza joint. They can safely walk, ride bikes, play soccer, basketball, swim and even get to school without a bus. This is not a fancy suburb for the wealthy. It's a decidedly normal one in a pretty normal midwest city.
Harry Potter's Privet Drive is unequivocally a suburb. While they are at "Number Four", the houses are all blandly similar, perhaps a cookie-cutter housing development. Vernon Dursley is in industrial drill sales and Petunia Dursley is a stay-at-home "mother" of two, though she spends most of the effort on Dudley.
These couple of chapters every book, where Harry lies low and gets abused at Privet Drive, are tales of suburban doldrum and wasted life. Vernon lives for the capitalist dream of fancy cars and vacations, Petunia lives on gossip and spying on the neighbors, Dudley lives for food, bullying, and quick thrills. All the Dursleys are about conformism and consumerism, sign-posts for the suburban life.
By being "neglected" of these things, Dumbledore says Harry has "escaped the appalling damage" done to Dudley (Book 6, Chapter 3). Harry is much more comfortable at the "rural" Hogwarts Castle, though admittedly that's got hundreds of friends, jinxes for any craving, mad drug potions, and who knows what else. It's really not a fair comparison, 9/10 would prefer Hogwarts' hybrid urban/rural feel.
Also, side note, my HN name is a combination of HP + Windows/Linux humor. I have no idea if many people got that over the years.
The Dick and Jane books were set in the 'burbs. The suburbs are primarily white, cisgender and bastions of Patriarchy. Children's books that portray a white, cisgender, patriarchal world are not favored by the publishing or educational establishment.
That’s not quite correct - upscale of diversity is seen as an industry issue; creators of children’s books are mostly white and predominantly female. Interesting breakdown from a UK literacy charity: https://www.booktrust.org.uk/globalassets/resources/represen...
t’s true that some popular picture books do seem to have a suburban setting: Victoria Kann’s Pinkalicious series (2006-), the Berenstain Bears series (1962-) by the Berenstain family, and Norman Bridwell’s Clifford the Big Red Dog (1963-) come to mind. But these books also come to mind when I consider books I’d rather burn than read – not because they take place in the suburbs but because they’re so poorly written and illustrated. My only claim here is that the best children’s books forgo suburbia.
Just thinking about my kids' favorites of late and the Ladybug Girl series is set in exurbia and Mac B Kid Spy is set in suburban California when he's not flying off to England and elsewhere in the service of the Queen of England.