Kids Books Are Too Wimpy

Currently, one of the bestselling children's books in the country is This is Not My Hat, by Jon Klassen. It tells the story of a fish who steals the hats of a bigger fish, tries to get away, then gets caught and eaten (oops -- spoiler alert!).

This is Not My Hat recently won the prestigious Caldecott Award for Best Children's Book of 2012, but some people are not fans. Their criticism is evidence, as if any more were needed, that our kids have grown soft.

It's been a long time since I was ten, but a still remember a children's book back then that I was genuinely twisted and scary -- and not in the the slapstick Lemony Snicket way. It is called Herman's Hat. I don't mind children's books that aim to uplift outsiders and prevent bullying, whether it's The Paperboy (about a stutterer) or the current #1 bestseller Wonder (the protagonist suffers with a deformed face). But sometimes a kid needs to confront a book that suggest that he, himself, is messed up, not the rest of the world. Herman's Hat is such a book.

But before getting to that, it's interesting to see the main complaints about This is Not My Hat. From Amazon:

• I did not like the fact that one fish "STEALS" the others hat and then the other "EATS" him. Not very nice thing to read to a child.
• This book is not appropriate for little kids. A fish steals a hat from another fish because he wants it. And gets away with it for most of the book. In the end, he either gets eaten or the original hat owner just takes the hat back and nothing seems to have happened. Does this mean grabbing and grabbing back is an acceptable behavior?
• I found the book to be disturbing and my poor kid looked kind of traumatized at the end. I definitely think it depends upon your audience. One of my sons does not understand humor. Do not purchase this book for a kid who doesn't understand subtle humor and social situations - like kids on the spectrum. Not good.

This sensitivity is quite different form the kids pop culture world that I grew up in in the 1970s. People don't remember, but in the 1960s and early 1970s America went through a period where children were depicted as monsters in the popular culture.

A Charlie Brown Christmas showed children as capable of religious and psychological insight as well as terrible cruelty. The Spider-Man cartoon of the era had the web-slinger going on a drug trip. Kids were literally demonic in 1970s films like The Exorcist, Rosemary's Baby and It's Alive. And they were like small adults with complex psyches in books like Rumble Fish and Are You There God? It's Me Margaret. It was a much darker world than Diary of a Wimpy Kid and even Harry Potter.

It was this milieu that produced Herman's Hat. Written by George Mendoza and illustrated by Frank Bozzo Herman's Hat was published in 1969 and given to me sometime in the early 1970s, when I was about ten. I forget who gave it to me, but I do remember being seriously rattled by the book. It tells the story of a young boy name Herman who is given a large top hat by a circus clown who tells Herman to never take the hat off or else people will be able to see his thoughts.

If such a book were written today, the plot would be predictable. Herman's thoughts would include his dislike for a certain teacher, maybe his craving for pizza, his love for a girl -- or even more likely, for a boy. But Herman's Hat was published in the era of It's Alive, and the thoughts inside the hat are aggressive, bizarre, even oedipal. He is told by his father to take the hat off, but Herman just pulls it down tighter, imagining he is a king who can shame and humiliate his parents. During his bath Herman imagines himself in the crow's nest of a pirate ship, where he spots a strange starving being on a raft -- his emaciated father, who looks "wold-eyed and hungry and starved as a wolf."

Frank Bozzo's art is characteristic of the psychedelic style of the time -- think the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. The nightmare Herman has where he travels to the land of stumpy half-men with huge hats is still weird and disturbing. I had the book under a stack of clothes in my closet, where it remained for decades. As a kid I was afraid to even dig it up. I didn't like to be reminded that Herman was a tyrant, or see the horrible illustration of his father as a starving wolf.

Yet I never gave away Herman's Hat or threw it out -- something of a miracle considering my ADD personality. Why did I hold on to it for so long? Maybe I knew that while I was parts of the heroes of the other books I read -- Brooks Robinson, Frodo, President Kennedy -- in my subconscious I knew that I was also part Herman, with his tantrums, ego, and, ultimately, repentance. It's not a bad lesson for today's overly praised kids.