Tag Archives: Children

An ABC of Children’s Books

By Robin Bates | Published: December 7, 2010

As we enter the holiday season, you can expect a number of posts on children’s books.  I have mentioned several times how one of my father’s great joys when we were growing up was reading us the books he had loved as a child.  We got extra reading around the Christmas season.  Here’s a poem […]

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Read Your Kids Nonsense Poems

By Robin Bates | Published: November 18, 2010

I taught Alice in Wonderland a couple of weeks ago and found myself thrown back to wonderful childhood memories of my father reading me Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry.  Authority figures in the book are always ordering Alice to recite instructional verse, like Issac Watts’ “Against Idleness and Mischief” or Robert Southey’s “The Old Man’s Comforts […]

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Imagination Unleashed: Children on Bikes

By Robin Bates | Published: September 18, 2010

Sports Saturday I bicycle virtually everyday to the college where I work, about a mile and a quarter from home.  Unless it’s raining or snowing, motorists can see me pumping along, my pants tucked into my socks, my necktie blowing in the wind, my backpack weighed down with laptop, lunch, and the Longman Anthology of British […]

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The Church and the Chimney-Sweep’s Cry

By Robin Bates | Published: September 16, 2010

In his August 29 Washington Mall speech, rightwing television commentator Glenn Beck attacked (among other things) the notion that Christianity should be concerned with issues of social justice. He accused Barack Obama and liberation theology of distorting Jesus’s message. For the President, Beck said, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, […]

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Talking to Kids about Movies

By Robin Bates | Published: July 9, 2010

Stand by Me (Rob Reiner, 1986)  Film Friday First, a quick prayer of thanksgiving: my father, who is responsible for my love of literature and film, underwent successful surgery on a blocked artery Tuesday. He had been experiencing sharp pains and a stent was installed. Such are the miracles of modern medicine that, by Thursday […]

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Rediscovering Wild Strawberries

By Robin Bates | Published: December 8, 2009

My daughter-in-law’s recent blog post on children, discussed yesterday, has taken me back to a time when I myself wrestled with the question of whether we should bring children into an uncertain world.  A powerful work addressing this issue is Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, a magnificent film that feels like literature. The film is about a day […]

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On the Logic of Having Babies

By Robin Bates | Published: December 7, 2009

In a recent post on her website, my wonderful daughter-in-law reflects on whether she and Darien will have children.  The reflection was occasioned by our Iowa Thanksgiving where she saw all of her husband’s cousins having children (and I mean all, the only exceptions being those who are in college or younger).  So Betsy compiles […]

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Moral Verse for Bad Little Children

By Robin Bates | Published: December 4, 2009

When I was a child, I was a great fan of the tongue-in-cheek “cautionary verses” of English poet Hilaire Belloc.  I have written in the past about how, in the Alice books, Lewis Carroll took off after those heavy-handed Victorian moralists who tried to scare children into good behavior.  Belloc did more of the same, […]

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Honoring Our Inner Wild Rumpus

By Robin Bates | Published: October 19, 2009

Illustration from Where the Wild Things Are I see that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) has been turned into a film, which has led Slate columnist Jack Shafer to revisit a controversy about the book. Apparently Sendak still can’t let go of a critique by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. I was surprised to learn […]

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