Once upon a time, every child was born into a loving home with a mum and a dad. That’s a fairy tale, of course, though you wouldn’t know it to dip into the average 20th-century classic kids’ book. Raymond Briggs’s The Snowman, Eric Hill’s Spot series, Judith Kerr’s The Tiger Who Came to Tea, Shirley Hughes’s Dogger, Else Holmelund Minarik’s Little Bear books—the grown-ups in these stories invariably come in twos, a mummy and a daddy, be they tucked up in bed together, eating tea across the table from one another or jointly navigating a teachable moment.
I’ll admit it: before becoming a solo parent, I’d been impatient with anxieties about literature being relatable to kids in every sort of home, believing it to be a strictly adult concern. Yes, it’s clearly good for children to encounter as many differently shaped families on the page as possible, but our small ones are so much more outward-looking than we navel-gazing grown-ups are, and read to find the world, not themselves. For a picture book “reader,” fire engines and flamingos, drainpipes and dandelions are all more richly rewarding topics than their own reflections. Besides, at that age, they can easily spend half a day being someone else entirely—a witch, an astronomer, a hedgehog.
It was Goldilocks and the Three Bears that changed my mind. Reading it in our just-the-two-of-us home, the story’s singsong chorus of Papa-Mama-Baby-bear began to grate. Not only that: I could suddenly hear its refrain echoing through so many of our other bedtime favourites. Had I become woke, or were months and months of broken nights finally taking their toll, inducing another kind of wokeness?
Soon, I was tweaking the mighty Judith Kerr as I read. I tried “mummy’s friend” in lieu of daddy, but it sounded, well, creepy—at least to me. That said, my daughter was too caught up with the drama between the principal players, Sophie and the tiger, to notice—a reminder that the best parents in children’s books, regardless of gender, sexual orientation or relationship status, are absent ones who leave their little ones to their fun.
Roaming beyond the books that I grew up with, I found that there are plenty out there depicting alternative families. They deal, too, with divorce and adoption, bereavement and abuse. Unfortunately, they tend to be overly self-conscious in their mission, heavy on message and short on enchantment. There are, of course, joyful exceptions. A favourite in our house is Who’s Your Real Mum? by Bernadette Green and Anna Zobel, in which Evie, the young daughter of a same-sex couple, fields her friend Nicholas’s insistent question with confidence, wit and an abundance of imagination.
In general, though, far better as both art and parable are those texts that offer an altogether more oblique glimpse of another kind of family: books like Anthony Browne’s Gorilla, for instance, which dates from 1983 and depicts a gorilla-obsessed girl whose mother is absent—no explanation is given—and whose physically present father has emotionally checked out. Come the child’s birthday, she asks for a gorilla and is disappointed to receive only a toy version, but that night, it comes to life. Despite a happy ending, it’s a story heavy with melancholy.
Turning back to more vintage fables, I found plenty of other nonconformist families. Remember that Peter Rabbit and his sisters are brought up by a single mum, their father having been baked in a pie by that ruddy-nosed menace, Mr McGregor. Likewise, Winnie the Pooh and his friends make a fine family of choice, and Eloise and Madeline, unnervingly precocious little girls, might as well be orphans.
In truth, there is nothing more traditional than a so-called non-traditional family. Women have always managed on their own; grandparents have always stepped up; dads have always fathered other men’s children; and Auntie Sue down the road has always found space at the table for the kid who simply didn’t fit into his own family. Ironically, perhaps the most complex depiction of family lies in original fairy tales themselves. Blended families, absentee parents, tormenting siblings and conflict galore—it’s all there.
Which brings me back to Goldilocks. Intriguingly, the story is rooted in a 19th-century tale in which it’s an old woman, not a blonde-haired child, who is the home invader. And while the log cabin she breaks into belongs to three bears, they aren’t a family, at least not in the oppressively nuclear sense. They are instead a trio of ursine bachelors—an unconventional sort of family, indeed.
