The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Picture Books and Other Threats (with Betsy Bird) #41
Stories aren’t just how we pass time—they’re how we pass on what it means to be human. We sit down with librarian and children’s literature expert Betsy Bird to unpack why reading aloud is more than a bedtime ritual. It’s brain food during the fastest phase of neural growth; a daily practice that builds language, attention, and the social skill that holds every relationship together: empathy.
We dive into research showing how literary fiction boosts theory of mind, helping kids understand that other people think and feel differently than they do. That skill matters in a polarized world where algorithms reward outrage and flatten nuance. Books slow us down long enough to inhabit another mind—what author John Green calls “shrinking the empathy gap.” We also confront the rise of organized book bans: why diverse stories and queer themes draw fire, how librarians already vet collections for age and quality, and what censorship really fears—children learning to perspective-take beyond the boundaries someone else drew for them.
Betsy shares three unforgettable picture books parents can use tonight. The Rabbit Listened models presence over fixing; Sorry You Got Mad turns a bad apology into a real one; Touch the Sky reframes perseverance as a long, honest process.
Along the way, we honor Banned Books Week as a reminder to protect access to complex stories.
If this conversation sparked an idea or gave you something to try with your kids, subscribe, leave a quick review, and share this episode with one parent who’d love it. Your recommendation helps other families find the show—and keeps the circle of stories alive.
For thousands of years, humans have primarily communicated meaning through stories. Our earliest account begins 4,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, where people are already telling the story of Gilgamesh, a king who could conquer anything but death. A story not about power, but about the limits of power. Around the same time in Egypt, a sailor tells his panicked commander about a shipwreck, a storm, and a giant serpent who offers him comfort instead of fear. That's the shipwrecked sailor. A story about how our fate is not totally up to us. In India, the stories were sung. Hymns of the Rigvada carried for centuries, word for word by memory alone. In Greece, blind poets like Homer told of Odysseus, ten years at sea, storms, gods, monsters, but really just longing for home. A story that spawned most of what we see now in movie theaters. A hero's journey about how meaning is found not in conquest, but in return. Then there's the Hebrew carpenter from the backwater town of Nazareth, who grew up listening to stories and made up his own stories about good Samaritans, prodigal sons, and a bunch of farmers. And then he was gone. And other people told stories about him, stories that would shape our world for the next 2,000 years. Today we have our own shared stories, our own myths. Stories about real people like George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, stories about fictional ones, Huck Finn, Sherlock Holmes. We also have our own personal stories. The day we lost our innocence, the first time we knew grief, the story of how we fell in love, the day that we became a parent. Modern neuroscientists have shown us what we've known for millennia: that humans make meaning from stories. They are our tools to teach, to remember, connect, to make meaning. They're often called humanity's greatest invention. So great, in fact, that we had to invent other ways of telling those stories. From oral history to writing, from copied texts to printing presses, and eventually mass market publishing industry. How we consume our stories will keep changing, but they remain our most valuable treasure, not only for our well-being, but the future of our world. The stories we tell matter more than almost anything else, and if we're smart, they can become our greatest asset as parents. Today on the Whole Parent Podcast, we're asking how important are books in the life of a child? We're going to dig into what the research says, we're going to hear from one of the leading voices in children's literature, and we're going to explore why reading aloud might just be one of the most revolutionary acts in parenting. Let's dig into it. Betsy Byrd is the kind of person who knows more about children's books than most people know about their own families. She's a longtime librarian, former head of all children's literature for the New York Public Library System, and now leading the collection at Evanston Public Library, the place where I learned how to read. She's reviewed children's books, written about children's books, written children's books herself. You get it. She loves children's books.
SPEAKER_01:I'm always fascinated, but particularly when I encounter parents who don't read to their babies, don't read to their toddlers because they're like, well, they're not gonna understand it at this point. And I'm like, what do you think reading is? It's making those connections, it's taking those synapses and connecting them in the brain. So from a very, very early age, if you can associate books with cuddling with, you know, a parent or guardian, it can be incredible.
SPEAKER_00:I want to pause here for a moment. I used to think that bedtime stories were just, well, bedtime stories. Part of a bedtime routine. Maybe a way to wind down, but ultimately a tool to get kids to sleep and avoid the dreaded, one more cup of water, please. But Betsy sees books differently. She sees them as tools and, well, brain food.
SPEAKER_01:Everyone's like talking about, like, oh, I want my kid to be the smartest, I want my kid to be the best at this, that, and the other. But starting like right at zero because they move so fast. Their brains are making these connections so incredibly quickly. If you can have any influence on that, it's a good thing. And books, my lord, books are the cheapest, the most natural way to do it.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, let's pause again and ask here: is there research to back this up? Actually, yes. A lot of it. Studies from developmental psychology show that narrative fiction, especially books with rich emotional content, can significantly boost a child's theory of mind. For those not familiar with the term, theory of mind is a person's ability to understand thoughts, emotions, and perspectives of someone else. Basically, that not everyone thinks and experiences the world as they do. Kids don't come with theory of mind built in. It's something that they have to develop over time. Some kids have a harder time with it than others, and books can really help. According to a 2013 study from Kidd and Costano, reading literary fiction increases empathy scores because of its impact on the developing theory of mind. Here's how Betsy puts it.
SPEAKER_01:You're a small blob who has been dropped into a crazy place, and now you have something that actually is going to help you comprehend what all this is. Um, so it's a tool, it's a tool for kids. It's such an opportunity. It's like, oh my god, like, you know, you have a chance to make a kid, you know, on like comprehend the world.
SPEAKER_00:I want to stay on this point for a moment because I think it's huge. In my personal and professional experience, the single most important tool for healthy relationships is empathy. People who are not empathetic parents, coworkers, friends, and partners fail to foster meaningful long-term relationships that can last. Let me say it clearly. One of the most important relational skills that you can teach to your child is to lead with empathy. And books are empathy machines. Here's what John Green, a world-renowned, best-selling fiction and now nonfiction author says about books. My case for books is that they shrink the empathy gap. Because when I read Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield isn't my friend, my spouse, or my anything. He's as close to I can come to being someone else. And through the process of imagining with clarity and sophistication what it's like to be someone else, we both learn what it is to be ourselves, but all we also learn what it is to be one of the other 8 billion people on this planet. I don't think it's a hot take to say that we live in a pretty divided and conflicted world. Over the summer, we saw a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota assassinated in her own home. Three weeks ago, Charlie Kirk, an extremely controversial and popular voice in the far right, was killed on a college campus. These murders, in many ways, are the next escalation in a political climate fraught with increasing polarization. I don't think it's really hard to see how we got here. For the last decade, social media algorithms have been increasingly adept at keeping us in our own personalized echo chambers, stoking our fears and our hatred to keep us online, generating ad revenue for them. Politicians, media personalities, and yes, even our social media creators, people like me, have learned that the best way to drive engagement and views is by pushing people into their camps, creating an ever-flowing source of controversy for the algorithms to feed us. All of this leads to one unmistakable outcome the erasure of our empathy. We are no longer interested in understanding Holden Caulfield like John Green. We're now here to judge him and venerate him or cancel him, depending on whether he is on our side or not. Go online and search this. Look at your TikTok feed. You'll hear takes like Holden is a misogynist or Holden is misunderstood. Or perhaps Holden is just a prophetic example of the male loneliness epidemic. Maybe Holden is a feminist satire. Holden is a hero, Holden is a villain, Holden is brilliant, Holden is just annoying, whiny, entitled. Or maybe the truth is all of the above. The question is, what will our kids think of Holden Caulfield? Or maybe better said, will our kids even know who he is?
SPEAKER_01:That's the thing, is that this isn't new. We have waves of book banning at certain times, and we always have. The difference now being it's better organized. You've got the internet. Now you've got the internet. Now people can get mad together. Collective madness in every sense.
SPEAKER_00:For years, Catcher in the Rye, the book with Holden as the protagonist, has been universally accepted as one of the great works of American fiction. It's also been one of the most banned books in history. Course language is often cited as a reason as well as sexual content. Notably here, though, by sexual content, what's depicted is discussions about sex, not actually sex itself. But then there are other reasons. Holden is a rebel struggling with depression and alienation who questions authority and traditional hierarchy. Holden, in other words, is not a hero that advocates of that traditional hierarchy want young, impressionable children to emulate.
SPEAKER_01:So the idea is that you are protecting children, that there is something in this literature that is dangerous. Whether it's giving kids ideas they wouldn't have otherwise, exposing them. You know, the they don't want to talk about racial racial diversity. They'll say things are woke, but they don't like the increase necessarily in all these BIPOC creators and characters in these books. So that's not great for them.
SPEAKER_00:Maybe, as some critics have pointed out, Holden's curious and ambiguous reactions to the people he meets, his constant admonition that everyone everywhere is fake or, in his words, phony, his veneration of these celibate nuns that he meets, and especially his own strained relationship with his own sexuality points to a different conclusion. Maybe the real reason we don't want kids reading about Holden is that he might be gay.
SPEAKER_01:So then on top of that, you have the LGBTQ stuff, you know, and so that they feel like, oh, okay, that's a threat. To know that this stuff exists, I guess, I'm a little unclear on that one. I think they think these books will turn their children gay, which apparently is a terrible thing. But they they certainly just don't want to wait, they just don't want to deal with it. And that's fine for your own kids. You don't want your kid to read a book. That's your right. You're a parent. You don't you can keep your kid unless your kid's older and finding books on their own. Oh, that's where it comes into. But you know, if you want your kid to read that picture book, you have the right to say don't. Where you don't have the right is to say that that person over there, they should not be reading that book to their kid. And that's where it all breaks down. But it's interesting in a horrible way as well, because it really does speak to the idea that ideas are the dangerous thing here. That if you expose a kid to ideas, I could not we're not even going to get into like graphic novels and stuff like that, where there's visuals on top of it, but these are just words. Um, and then you know, picture books with some pictures, but they're always appropriate if they're in picture books. And let us not forget, every single one of these books has been vetted to even get into the library. There's a lot of schlack out there that libraries are not buying on a regular basis. But we have trained professionals, professionals who have gone to school specifically for this purpose of deciding what to and what not to buy for one community or another, but apparently that is not good enough. And we must keep everyone's children from seeing these things. And that's where it gets real squidgy. The fact that in the age of the internet, this is the threat. I'm like, wow, okay. Yeah. Have you been online?
SPEAKER_00:This is an interview that I've been sitting with for a while. I conducted it over a year ago. And it's this last quote from Betsy that really has had me thinking for basically that whole time. In the age of the internet, this is the threat. And what I've finally come to is that, yes, for the group of people who wants to ban Catcher in the Rye, or John Green's book, Looking for Alaska, or the now infamous Not All Boys Are Blue, I think these books are the threat. The threat that their children might learn to perspective take and empathize with groups that they want to erase. Empathy is radicalizing. Once you've empathized with an undocumented immigrant, it gets harder to justify masked men abducting them off the street. Once you've empathized with a black protagonist, it becomes harder to claim that racism is no longer an issue. Once you've empathized with a gay or lesbian or trans or bisexual protagonist, it becomes harder to argue that they ought not to exist. Empathy, proximity, perspective, these are all incredibly dangerous for those who want to hate. It's why Hitler, a man bent on making people hate, had to first burn the stories of Jews before turning to their bodies. Stories are, as John says, there to shrink our empathy gap. And maybe that's the whole game. And here's what she said.
SPEAKER_01:Immediately I thought of three books, two of them from this year, one from about two or three years ago. The one that if you haven't encountered it already, it is maybe one of the best books on boy. It's just emotionally, it's just it's it disgusts you. It's called The Rabbit Listened by Corey Dorfeld. And it is about how to deal with someone going through something hard. A kid is just building with brick like blocks, someone knocks him over. Now the kid is like upset. And all these different animals are coming in to tell the kid how to deal with this emotion. Like you should get mad, like you should cry, like you should like laugh it off, forget about it, you know. And they're all and then the rabbit finally comes in, and all the rabbits tearing up, literally saying this. The rabbit just listens. And then the kid is able to go through all those different things by talking to the rabbit who's just there to listen. It's so good. It's so well done. For me, it's kind of set the standard for books like this where it's like the message is so simple, but so hard for even adults to get. And it's just like, because it could be any form of grief. It doesn't have to be your blocks being knocked down, but that's such a kid-centric, like understanding. In a similar way, there's another kind of blocks being knocked down book that's out this year called I'm sorry you got mad by Kyle Lukov. And it is a series of apologies. So a kid has done something and has to write, according to their teacher, a note to another kid in the class apologizing. And the notes are like terrible, like at the start, like, you know, sorry you got mad. And then the teacher's like, try again. And it's entirely epistolary. It's entirely done through these letters, and you slowly begin to realize why this incident occurred. The apologies start to get better and better until finally you have a legitimately good apology. Again, this is a book that I feel like adults should be reading like a lot of the time because it's just a really good how-to-do an apology book, but it's also just very funny. Um, Julie Kwan did the art for it and ended her kids. It's just, she's never done humor before. She's done a lot of very emotional, meaningful picture books. Nothing against those. But this one is both emotional, meaningful, and very funny at the same time, which is kind of my sweet spot. It's kind of what I love. And then there's another one this year, and this was more on the fun side, but again, it's just really good. Um, called Touch the Sky by Stephanie Lucianovic. And it's about just learning to pump your legs on a swing and how hard that is. And it's about how kids have to constantly learn things that are hard, like riding a bike or learning how to pump. And it's not the instant. There was a I always say it's the Elmo situation where there's an Elmo sequence on Sesame Street where Elmo hat wants to learn the trumpet, tries the first time, doesn't get it, tries the second time, doesn't get it, tries the third time. They're amazing at it. And it's like, no, that's not how learning things works. It's like you've got to show kids. And the pumping the legs in touch the sky is brilliant. At the same time, very beautiful book. Chris Clark did the art and it's just rainbow amazing colors. And then just funny. It's very funny. Like the kid like lying in those wood chips under the swing, being like, Maybe I'll live here now. Maybe this is easier than trying. And uh it's just a really good showing how long it takes to learn something, though.
SPEAKER_00:I've struggled to know when I wanted to release this episode. I've had the interview for a really long time and tried to figure out exactly what I wanted to say. But I felt like it was important to release it this week, the beginning of season three. Because as I've been seeing at all of the local libraries that we go to, and by the way, not included in our conversation, was a long section where Betsy goes into depth about how libraries are not just about books. They're about story time and scavenger hunts and ways to take your kid somewhere that doesn't cost a bunch of money in the middle of winter in Chicago when you just need a place to go with your toddler. As we have been going to all of libraries, which is one of our favorite things to do, we've noticed posters up everywhere that this week, beginning October 5th, is Banned Books Week. It's a week about awareness that some stories are under a greater threat than they have been, maybe in our lifetimes. It's massively important that we keep those stories. Not because I agree with all of them. Betsy also talked about in another place in our interview how sometimes the banning comes from the other side. People wanting to ban books that have implicitly racist or misogynistic content baked in. Children's books like Tiki Tiki Dembo, or one of the most famous examples from Dr. Seuss. It's important to keep all of these stories because they tell the true story of what it is to be human. They shrink our empathy gap. They are tools, perhaps the greatest tool that we have for teaching our children emotional intelligence, perspective taking, and love for the amazing world that is around them. To end this episode, I wanted to read to you one of the books that Betsy pointed out. My favorite of the three, although all three are really good, and you can get them and you should get them. But the one that is my favorite is The Rabbit Listened. It's the one that she talked the most about. And I wanted to read it to you at the end of our episode to remind you that in spite of all of the hard things that we've talked about, our most important job as parents, the best thing that we can do for our kids is to be people who listen. One day, Taylor decided to build something. Something new. Something special. Something amazing. Taylor was so proud. But then out of nowhere, things came crashing down. The chicken was the first to notice. Clack clock. What a shame. I am so sorry, sorry, this happened. Let's talk to talk to talk to talk about it. Clack clock but Taylor didn't feel like talking. So the chicken left. Next came the bear. How horrible. I bet you feel so angry. Let's shout about it. But Taylor didn't feel like shouting. So the bear left. The elephant knew just what to do. I can fix this. We just need to remember exactly how things were. But Taylor didn't feel like remembering. So the elephant also left. One by one they came. The hyena. Let's laugh about it. The ostrich. What's hard and pretend nothing happened. The kangaroo. Let's throw it all the way. And the snake. Someone else. But Taylor didn't feel like doing anything with anybody. So eventually, they all left. Until Taylor was alone. In the quiet, Taylor didn't even notice the rabbit. But it moved closer and closer. Until Taylor could feel its warm body. Together they sat in silence. Until Taylor said, please stay with me. The rabbit listened. The rabbit listened as Taylor talked. The rabbit listened as Taylor shouted. The rabbit listened as Taylor remembered and laughed. The rabbit listened as Taylor made plans to hide, to throw everything away, to ruin things for someone else. Through it all, the rabbit never left. And when the time was right, the rabbit listened to Taylor's plans to build again. I can't wait, Taylor said. It's going to be amazing. Number one, if you got anything out of this episode, if it made you think, if you felt like you have something new to try with your kids or it made you a better parent, please take a moment to go and leave a review and rate this podcast five stars wherever you're listening to it. It's the single best way to help more parents find this show. It'll take you less than a minute. Just scroll down on your podcast app, tap those stars, and if you've got an extra 30 seconds, leave a couple words for me to let me know how this podcast has been helping you. I read every single review. It really means the world to me. Number two, after you rate it and review it for the masses, I really want to encourage you to think about what we talked about in this episode and send it to one parent in your phone who you feel like might benefit from this specific episode. It's great to have ratings and reviews, and yes, they help so much, but there's nothing like a personal recommendation from a friend, hey, you gotta listen to this. It's really been helping me. Last, if you want to go deeper with me, get exclusive parenting insights, free resources, and updates on everything that I'm doing, go ahead and join my email list. It's where I share things that I don't get to get into on the podcast. I also will let you know about upcoming episodes and events, and best of all, it's completely free. You can sign up at wholeparentacademy.com or just go to the show notes below and there'll be a link there. Alright, that's it for now. Thanks again for listening, and thank you in advance for doing those three quick favors for me. This has been the Whole Parent Podcast.
