As a homeschooling mother of six children, including four boys, our home library of children’s books is extensive. My older children are reading chapter books, and they are consuming them faster than I can research them and obtain them from the library and used booksellers. For my oldest daughter, it’s not particularly difficult to procure her next read — the protagonists in most chapter books written for her age are girls with whom she can identify. After having literally co-written the book on radical indoctrination of childhood last year with Karol Markowicz, Stolen Youth, my radar is always up for inappropriate content written for children in the last 15 years. But perhaps a bigger problem than indoctrination for me in choosing my sons’ next reads is this: for chapter book-reading boys, there is next to no content written for their age range.
After writing my book, I started an Instagram page called RightBooks4Kids along with another homeschooling mother, Rachel Reeves. We didn’t want to be just warning parents about the bad books — we wanted to help parents discern and identify the good ones. We open our book-finding suggestions up to online requests: What do parents want our help with as they choose their child’s next read? The question we receive most frequently by a large margin is a variation of “What book written in the last few decades could my chapter book-loving son read next?”
On my bookshelves, my boys’ favorite books that they consider to be page-turners include Hardy Boys, Billy and Blaze, and Freddy the Pig books. The first books in each of those series were written in the late 1920s and 1930s. Don’t get me wrong — they’re great books. But we need something less than 100 years old, too.
In 2022, I spoke with Susan (a pseudonym), an editor at a large publishing house who works exclusively on its children’s books. She told me about how the obsession over equity, diversity, and other woke buzzwords is, at a sheer practical level, eating hours and hours of her work weeks with nonstop meetings. “We have biweekly meetings to discuss the initiatives we’re going to take to make our publishing programs more woke and activist oriented,” she explained. One consequence of these meetings, naturally, is to align their hiring to make the employee base more woke — the people who find it silly, sinister, or tiresome end up leaving or not being brought on in the first place.
Susan went on to explain, “Whereas [once] the real impetus was to find great books, meaningful books and not really put the color of the author’s skin at the forefront, now the questions of race and sexual orientation and gender and all those woke buzzwords feels like it’s more important than finding great literature. I was never told that we shouldn’t sign up white authors 10 years ago, but now it’s being said. We’ve been told we have quotas now.”
For parents of reading-aged boys, though, the issue with radical progressive ideology in publishing isn’t just the indoctrination into matters of sexuality and race. Woke progressives see masculinity as toxic, something that must be snuffed out of boys. This agenda is pervasive in entertainment of all kinds produced for children — the heroes of past literature would never appear in modern children’s books of the present.
This is troubling from a number of angles. Children absolutely need to see themselves in literature, and when there is no literature being written for and by straight men, there is an entire generation of boys who grow up without role models in literature. Men comprise just 40.5% of the student body on college campuses and are more likely to drop out of high school — 6% for boys versus 4.2% for girls. The lack of connection that boys and young men have to literature taught in their schools and on their library shelves plays a role in their disaffection with learning.
There’s a reason why the old adage “They don’t make them like they used to” applies to the output from the entertainment industry, including books. When publishing houses find themselves more concerned with finding authors of color writing about transgender children, the end product isn’t going to be nearly to the level of the books in the canon of classic literature. When researching my book, I heard from a number of authors about how these quotas and fixations on woke storylines affect the quality of the work being published. Imperishable books such as The Hardy Boys and The Phantom Tollbooth or authors such as C.S. Lewis and Mark Twain would not be printed now. When the top priority of a writer, agent, or editor is producing woke content, instead of producing art, the quality inevitably suffers. Imagine how many hours of Susan’s days are wasted on diversity and activism meetings that would better be spent combing through manuscripts, fine-tuning them, or mentoring talented writers.
One of the few modern books I and the best homeschooling resources recommend for young boys is The Green Ember series by author S.D. Smith. The series is about a family of rabbits who heroically fight off evil forces to shape a new community in new lands. What makes it so good and what makes my sons love it is the sense of adventure, bravery, and honor the rabbits exhibit. But Smith, for his virtues, is punished — he has to exist outside the ordinary publishing ecosystem. Smith is an independent writer and started his own publishing company, Story Warren, to get his work printed. He is doing something downright transgressive in modern American children’s literature: He is a man writing books with themes of masculinity and honor. His new book, Found Boys, published by a small Christian publisher, Harvest House, is a modern-day Huckleberry Finn, even taking on matters of race with nuance. In a publishing world where every mention of race has to run through multiple “sensitivity readers” to make it to print, Smith’s efforts are practically criminal to the woke overlords at traditional publishing houses.
When I spoke to him about the environment authors face today, which he has opted to circumvent, Smith told me, “In so much modern literature, boyhood is a disease to be cured and masculinity is a villain poised to destroy.” That’s why he has gone his own way. But he should not have to.
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Like me, Smith hears from countless parents about the troubles facing our search for appropriate and inspiring books for our sons. He explained, “My audience is packed with [parents] who are desperate for optimistic depictions of masculinity that their growing boys can latch on to. Boys are hungry for brave quests and noble causes but have been poisoned into passivity and perversity by an unmoored culture that rejects their gifts.”
There are real dangers with men who become tyrannical and abusive, as I and virtually any woman know. But the fact that there is such a big difference between a bad man and a good man is precisely why it is important for boys to have the kind of children’s art that shows them the things that engage them in becoming the latter. The very best check against bad men is giving boys a positive vision of what it means to be a good man. As Smith put it to me, “All of my books have this generous disposition toward the needs of boys at their heart. It should come as no surprise that moms and girls love them, too. They want those kinds of sons and brothers and friends and, eventually, husbands. The world needs them.”
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen Youth.