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REGISTER FOR SCBWI UNIVERSITY

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SCBWI Member Videos: How to Apply for Awards and Grants

2024

Southern Breeze (Alabama, Georgia, and Florida panhandle)

Hidden Messages In Children’s Picture Books analyzes six picture books, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Little Island, Horton Hatches the Egg, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Are You My Mother?, and Monster Mama to offer insights into the way children’s stories can lead young children to adopt and accept stereotyped gender roles or challenge them. If women want to change the way they are perceived, the first place to start is with the stories we tell. We can not challenge that which we are unaware exists.

Hidden Messages in Children's Picture Books

The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon have been popular for more than half a century, and although the third text of the trilogy, My World, is not well known, the three texts are clearly connected. The publisher describes My World as a companion to Goodnight Moon that allows readers to "revisit that beloved world of a little bunny and his family," and Brown and Clement Hurd, the illustrator, referred to these books as their "classic series." But no one has ever treated them as a trilogy or noted the pervasive use of Freudian symbols or the Oedipal structure of these books. The Runaway Bunny explores the little bunny's fantasy of the omnipotent mother. Goodnight Moon encourages a listening child to defy her, and My World, the only text in which the father appears, explores the bunny-boy's competitive approach to the father he simultaneously resents, admires and loves, while the mother rabbit slips from prominence in his life and into the shadows. Have A Carrot offers a useful framework for study in the combined fields of children's literature, psychology, and pop culture, and invaluable insights for teachers, parents and librarians. It is well researched with extensive annotations and a useful bibliography. The combination of historical fact from Brown's life, interdisciplinary perspectives on children's literature, and detailed analysis of the way the text and illustrations work together to convey multiple layers of meaning offers a useful framework for students preparing papers in the fields of children's literature, psychology, and pop culture, and provides invaluable insights for teachers, parents and librarians evaluating picture books.

Have a Carrot

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