A friend recently directed me to Berkeley Playhouse’s “content preview” for its current production of Peter Pan. It warns concerned parents about the show’s “emotional intensity” and “anguish expressed through acting and song,” and points out that the pirates make “poor choices” and many characters “use weapons.” I actually think it’s good to talk about problematic characters and scenes in classic children’s literature. But I started to wonder: What would an absolutely politically and socially perfect modern-day children’s book look like? Perhaps something like this.

Paula Span, a 20-year veteran of The Washington Post and The New York Times’s New Old Age blogger, talks with Tablet about her book When the Time Comes: Families with Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions (Springboard, Hachette, 2009), which derived from her own experience caring for her mother as she was dying and helping her father, now 87.

My 4-year-old daughter Maxine has been obsessed with a book about Noah’s Ark (which she calls Noah’s Work of Art). The other day, I asked her about the portrayal of God she was picking up from it. “God is the person who makes the laws,” she said confidently. “And if you break them you are in big, big trouble.”

Summertime, and the car rides ain’t easy

I wanted to march. I wanted Josie and Maxine to make signs: We Love Our Gay Uncles! I knew my kids would love the parade. Like many seven-year-olds, Josie is obsessed with fighting injustice (not only when it applies to getting an infinitesimally smaller piece of cake than her sister, but when it comes to ...

We’re in a bad mommy moment. There are blogs including Her Bad Mother (tagline: “Bad is the new good”); Bad Mom (tagline: “Embrace Badness”); Bad Mutha Blogger (featuring a photo of a baby in a onesie reading “Mutha Sucka”); and Bad Mummy, No Cookie (tagline: “Tough chick with kick-ass kid making it up as I ...

One of my kids, I get. The other is a mystery to me.
My daughter Josie, seven, is hyper-competitive. She feels everything way too intensely. She’s a voracious reader. She struggles endlessly with moral questions. When she’s angry, she narrows her eyes into little slits and a vein throbs in her jaw. I understand her ...

According to the Social Security Administration, the top five most popular names for boys born in 2008 were from Jewish Scripture: Jacob, Michael, Ethan, Joshua, and Daniel. The administration’s list of the top 100 names for girls includes such vintage American Jewish immigrant names as Sophie, Abigail, Hannah, Ella, Natalie, Lily, Lillian, Evelyn, and Rachel. ...

Here’s an observation: most bubbes in children’s books seem to populate a folkloric or historic landscape—a misty, mythical Chagall-esque Old World, or the Lower East Side at the turn of the century, or Holocaust-era Europe. These women have faces etched with deep lines, wispy buns on their heads. They wear babushkas or long, faded, flowery ...