Caleb and Kate get into a terrible argument. Like most couples, they “loved each other, but not every single minute.” Caleb storms out, “hating his wife from top to bottom,” but he soon cools off, having forgotten what the fight was even about. Before he returns to make up with Kate, however, he sits down to rest, and while he’s dozing, a passing witch casts a spell. When the unsuspecting Caleb wakes up, he’s a dog.
Well, these things happen — in children’s books. But while stupid fights, witches and magic spells are all common elements in stories for young people, what’s uncommon about William Steig’s 1977 picture book, “Caleb and Kate,” is that not a single child appears in its pages. Nor do they in several of Steig’s other beloved children’s books, at least not as main characters, whether monsters (“Shrek!”) or not.
“I never am trying to get anything across,” William Steig said of “Caleb and Kate” in an interview at the time. “I think it’s deadly. It ruins writing to have purposes like that.”
Steig may not have been trying to send a message to children, but children got the message anyway. “Caleb and Kate” acknowledges a world in which adults — even a reader’s parents — fight, but the world doesn’t end when they do. Moreover, it suggests that grown-up fights can be just as ludicrous as children’s squabbles, and adults can behave in equally rash and regrettable ways. They’re just grown-ups, after all — and this is both comforting and amusing information for children to absorb.
“Children see the adult world as mysterious and fascinating — and one they want to know,” said Leonard Marcus, a historian of children’s literature. “To be able to see into this secret world through children’s books creates a kind of empathy.”
Yet the adult protagonist has become a rare figure in American children’s books. With a few notable exceptions — “A Sick Day for Amos McGee” by Philip C. Stead and Erin E. Stead, and several titles by the author-illustrator Jon Agee come to mind — most children’s books today are deeply child-centric. This shift began in the 1960s, with the rise of developmental psychology, and intensified from the 1980s onward. “It’s become kind of codified that books for children should be about young children,” Marcus said, with a rule of thumb holding that the protagonist, whether animal or human, be the same age or slightly older than the reader.
But that’s a rule worth questioning. Some might see the entrenchment of child-centeredness in children’s literature as reinforcing what some social critics consider a rising tide of narcissism in young people today. But to be fair: Such criticisms of youth transcend the ages. What is certainly true now is the primacy of “mirrors and windows,” a philosophy that strives to show children characters who reflect how they look back to them, as well as those from different backgrounds, mostly with an eye to diversity.
This is a noble goal, but those mirrors and windows should apply to adults as well. Adults are, after all, central figures in children’s lives — their parents and caregivers, their teachers, their role models. They are also children’s future selves. What better way to understand these overgrown children than to inhabit their points of view? And yes, adults are often the Other — which makes them a mystery and a curiosity. Literature offers insight into these occasionally intimidating creatures.
The adult figures in children’s literature are also frequently outsiders or eccentrics in some way, and quite often subject to ridicule. They are the house painter Mr. Popper, who finds himself living with 12 penguins. They are boring Officer Buckle, who just wants to impart safety tips. The implicit lesson is that grown-ups aren’t infallible. It’s OK to laugh at them and it’s OK to feel compassion for them and it’s even OK to feel sorry for them on occasion.
In one of my favorite picture books, “The Story of Mrs. Lovewright and Purrless Her Cat,” written by Lore Segal and illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky, the dour Mrs. Lovewright is seemingly without company other than that of the grocery deliveryman Dylan — until he delivers a kitten at her request. “I don’t care what color so it’s little and cute and purrs on my lap,” she instructs him. She names her tabby Purrly so that he knows what he must do. But she quickly learns what every child must learn: You cannot force anyone — animal or human — to do exactly what you want, let alone to love you as you demand. It’s a profound lesson, more easily absorbed when delivered by a fussy old lady with flawed assumptions.
In real life, children revere adults and they fear them. It only follows, then, that they appreciate when adult characters behave admirably but also delight in seeing the consequences — especially when rendered with humor — when they don’t.
Nursery rhymes, folk tales, myths and legends overwhelmingly cast adults as their central characters — and have endured for good reason. Think the old woman who lived in the shoe and the villagers who prepare stone soup. For decades, children have gravitated toward the fully adult gods and goddesses of ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and Scandinavia and have gathered at the round table in King Arthur’s court.
In somewhat later tales, children investigated crimes alongside Sherlock Holmes, adventured through Narnia, inhabited Oz and traversed Middle-earth. Grown-up heroes can be hobbits, or rabbits (“Watership Down”), badgers or moles (“The Wind in the Willows”). Children join them no matter what because they like to be in league with their protagonists and by extension, their authors. As John Updike once wrote, in a children’s book review for The New York Times, “All successful children’s literature has a conspiratorial element.”
In children’s books with adult heroes, children get to conspire alongside their elders. Defying the too-often adversarial relationship between adults and children in literature, such books enable children to see that adults are perfectly capable of occupying their shared world with less antagonism — as partners in life, in love and in adventure. As people very much like themselves, actually. There’s still almost always a happy ending.