When I began reading picture books with my then-small son, it seemed to us that fathers were notable only for their absence. Mothers are ubiquitous in the lives of young children—and all the more so in the pages of their books. Mothers can be counted on to feed and clean, to cuddle and scold, to make picnics and to bundle into strollers for trips to the doctor. Fathers are less present. But it’s not the simple lack of fathers that is striking in books for young children—it’s also the constrained representation of fathers. Fathers are often—too often—defined in relation to paid work, whether the father in question works for pay or not. The weight of work, the weightiness of work, rests heavily on the shoulders of these men. Likewise, in the pages of books, fathers exist as full fledged people engaged in relationships with their children less often than mothers or siblings or grandparents. But real fathers are, of course, like mothers, loving, tired, joyful, busy, pensive, bored, and overwhelmed, trying to get on with the business of living.
What’s at stake in the representation of fathers in picture books? At their core, books about fathers present us with one of the great uncertainties of children’s literature, the question of whether children’s books should reflect the real world that the young child is coming to know day by day, or whether these books should represent an ideal world that we would like the child to one day inhabit, created by and for themselves out of expectations shaped by exposure to these very books (among other influences). Now, if the task of these books is to represent the actual world of the young child, then surely fathers must be largely absent in their pages, not there for the baths and meals and careful studies of snails that compose the lives of young children, real and fictional alike. For despite the fact that our culture is increasingly populated, indeed predominantly populated, by what continue to be termed "non-traditional families", living in an ever more polarized economic circumstances, fathers are in fact often absent from children’s lives, either because they work longer and more profitable hours than mothers, or because they have left their children, or because they were never present in the lives of the children they fathered. But if you believe that children deserve, are in fact owed a more profound vision of what it means to be human, and in this instance of what it means to be a man, than surely they deserve books that show them men who parent children as passionately and as ambivalently, as impatiently and as hopefully as do women.
So if you want to think through experiences with fathers with a child in fruitful ways, whether that child lives with a father or not, where can you turn? Let me share some of the books I’ve liked about fathers and their children with you—books for infants, toddlers and preschoolers. Many of them represent the ideal of the traditional families, father out for the day, mother in, but some do present more complex family situations—and all of them take fathers seriously as important people in the lives of children.
For very little children to the age of two or so, Helen Oxenbury’s Tom & Pippo books are wonderful. No more than four or six sentences long, they capture the simplicity and intensity of feeling experienced by very young children and their caregivers. Tom and Pippo’s Day evokes a child’s joy at the father’s return from work at the end of the long day, as the ever appealing round and rosy figure of Tom rushes into his smiling father’s outstretched arms.
Children who turn to books more for information about the real world than for stories might enjoy Ann Morris’s The Daddy Book, with photos by Ken Heyman. Here are full-color photographic portraits of children and fathers in many countries which suggest the solid sameness of the father-child relationship the world over. In fact, I’d be uncomfortable using this book with children older than three or four, because I think it oversimplifies the cultural complexities of family relationships, but for the very young child these loving pictures could serve as an affirmation of the simple humanity of men and their children. All things considered, though, I think I prefer Adele Aron Greenspun’s Daddies, a book of black-and-white photographs of fathers and children, with its heart-rending introduction for parents about the loss of her own father, its photos of fathers and children of all sizes, shapes, colors and ages, its poetic text that evokes the need of fathers for their children’s love.
Jan Ormerod’s wordless pair of books entitled Sunshine and Moonlight might coax a child unimpressed by narrative into the realm of story. The books illustrate the opening and closing moments of a young girl’s day with stunning visual accuracy, her little body fully engaged in each task before her, utterly recognizable to those who know small children.
But my favorite book about fathers right now is John Coy’s Night Driving. It’s a lovely picture book illustrated with soft smudgy black and white pencil drawings, about a boy and his father who go driving into the night together, and how they pass this time together: they listen to the radio until the signal fades, the boy pours his dad coffee from the thermos to help him stay awake, they change a flat and look at the stars, they fill gas and talk about the boy’s grandfather, they go to a diner for breakfast where the waitress says, “’You’re up early,’” and finally, after pancakes as big as plates, they arrive at the quiet spot where they pitch their tent. The book is about the journey and not the destination, a perfect metaphor for growing and for parenting, a book that speaks to both parent and child.
A wonderful and funny book, utterly different in style from Night Driving, and for a younger audience, is Taro Gomi’s I Lost My Dad. With its bold colors and blocky shapes, it renders the universal story of separation from the parent in a distinctly urban setting. It is narrated in the first person, by a boy who is browsing at the toy counter of a department store with his father when suddenly he realizes, ‘I lost my dad!’ The boy rushes through the store looking for his father and catching glimpses of his clothes everywhere—but at each cleverly cut page, you turn the leaf to discover that it is not in fact his father, not his shoes behind the piano, not his hat on a male mannequin. When finally the boy and his father catch sight of each other on the escalators, each going in the opposite direction, the father is unsurprisingly more worried than his son, who comforts him, and immediately bounces back to ask “’Can we go back to the toys now? I know what I want!’” My fellow readers were sure the answer was no—until we looked at the back cover.
As I said earlier, many, many books about fathers revolve around issues of work—and some of them are fantastic. My current favorite working father book is Anthony Browne’s Gorilla, about a girl whose father is so busy with his work that they never have time to do anything together. Browne’s photorealist watercolors verge on the surreal, and beautifully illuminate Hannah’s sadness, loneliness and isolation—especially the picture in which she sits in the corner of a room empty of all furniture but a television, whose light barely illuminates the wallpaper of the corner in which she miserably sits, wallpaper full of animals and plants that promise the world that lies beyond her reach. Her father’s colorless, lifeless face at the breakfast table, his body hunched at his desk, signal his unavailability. And all she wants is to go to the zoo to see her favorite animal, the gorilla. But the toy gorilla he gives her grows and comes to life in the night and takes Hannah through a city dotted with gorilla images. The picture of Hannah rushing down the stairs to tell her father about her adventures, a blur of red beyond the banisters, captures her excitement and her continuing devotion to the father who can at last ask “Do you want to go to the zoo?” Night Driving, I Lost My Dad, and Gorilla all play on central themes in the lives of young children, on the profound dependence of children, their genuine need for accompaniment into the world, the adventures that only an adult can offer, and their deep pleasure in the company of a beloved parent.
Some of the best books about fathers show them as unsurprising presences, mere backdrops in the lives of children caught up in their own momentous changes, as in Robert McCloskey’s One Morning in Maine; as caretakers who do what needs to be done even when out of patience, as in Patricia MacLachan’s The Sick Day; as pillars of support during times of dramatic change, as in Miriam Cohen’s Will I Have a Friend? and Laurence and Catherine Anholt’s Sophie and the New Baby, in which Sophie’s father trudges through the snow to gather his weeping daughter into his arms to hold her close. “’I know it’s hard, Sophie,’ he said. ‘Everything’s changed for you.’” These are the fathers we want in the lives of children, men who can wipe snotty noses and teary eyes, who work with their children at their sides, who walk through city streets and country snow holding little hands, always affirming the importance of children and their changing needs, men who can acknowledge the smallness of children and the courage inside of them.