By Michael Stelzer Jocks, History Faculty.
Every night before bed I read at least two books to my girls. I have been doing this since they were born. As such, I have become a bit of connoisseur of children’s books. Like every other area of literature, some books are good and some are 
not so good (I’m looking at you Rainbow Magic Series!). I have my favorites, and sometimes, but not always, these favorites are the same as my daughters.
As they have grown their tastes have changed and so have mine. At this point of fatherhood, I think I can safely say the worst genre are the books intended for the smallest of babies. These books can be cute, but there are only so many times you can read ‘Goodnight Moon’ by Margaret Wise Brown, or ‘The Going to Bed Book’, by Sandra Boynton before you want to scream. Luckily the toddler books are a bit better. The ‘Olivia’ books by Ian Falconer, ‘Madeline’ by Ludwig Behelmans, and Jon Muth’s ‘Zen Shorts’ were some of our favorites.
Finally, in the last couple years we have started with chapter books. We’ve completed some classics, such as Roald Dahl’s ‘James and the Giant Peach’, and E.B. White’s ‘Charlotte’s Web’. But most commonly these days we read more recently published series. Usually these series have female protagonists, such as ‘Judy Moody’ by Megan McDonald, ‘Nancy Clancy’ by Jane O’Connor and Annie Burrows’ ‘Ivy and Bean’. All three of these sets are pretty enjoyable, but I highly doubt the ‘Ivy and Bean’ or ‘Judy Moody’ books will have the same classic cache as the works of E.B. White. Most are just a bit too formulaic to live on beyond one generation of kids.
Still, there is something incredible about children’s books nowadays. In one way at least, modern books have a leg up on the works of Dahl and White. Though perhaps not as strong in the area of story-telling, the newer books seem to be more pedagogical. I have noticed that many books written during the last decade deliberately, though not obviously or annoyingly, attempt to assist children in growing a large vocabulary.
Let me give you just the latest example from our nightly readings:
During the last week, the girls and I have been reading a book called ‘Hamster Princess: Harriet the Invincible.’ Yes, it is not exactly Dickens or Hemingway, but it is a pretty fun read. Plowing through it, I have been awed by the number of college-level words sprinkled within an elementary school level book. Here are just a couple of examples of words that forced my girls to ask, ‘what does that word mean’ as we were reading:
- Ethereal.
- Melancholy
- Deportment
- Praetor
- Cower
- Thwarted
- Crone
- Blighted
- Snit
- Haughtily
- Dubiously
And this list is just from a quick glance through the book as I sit at my keyboard. I think it is realistic to say that there is a ‘vocab’ word each page or 
so.
So why the change from those old classics? Well, I think authors of children’s books have an understanding of how important reading and hearing words are to developing the minds of children. As I mentioned in a post a couple years ago, ‘it has been estimated that children who have parents that read books to them will have heard 30 million more words in their lives by the time they start school than those that have non-reading parents.’ If this is the case, why not use as many words as possible? Instead of ‘witch’, why not use ‘crone’; instead of ‘run-down’, why not use ‘blighted’; instead of ‘sad’, why not use ‘melancholy’?
At the very least, it keeps us parents on our word-definition toes.
The Flâneur's Turtle 