Well of course I’m not asleep! it’s 2:19 in the afternoon, which means it’s only 41 minutes until SCREEN TIME!
The moon is high. The sea is deep. They rock
and rock
and rock
to sleep.
If you’re not rocking with me to the end of Sandra Boynton’s The Going to Bed Book, it’s probably just because Goodnight Moon was your bedtime story of choice.
Or maybe it was any of the other children’s books that end when the main character falls asleep: when Harold drops his crayon, when Llama Llama snuggles pillow soft and deep, when Big Nutbrown Hare one-ups a sleeping Little Nutbrown Hare.
Then there are books with characters that, like the child being read to, are in bed. That’s where Little Bear is at the close of Frank Ash’s Popcorn. That’s where Peter Rabbit is as a cautionary tale about being a bad bunny. Alexander is in his bed at the end of his Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, even though he’s not happy about it. Love You Forever doesn’t end in bed, but the child does spend at least half of the book there while his mother creepily invades his personal space.
Books not framed as bedtime stories often have a stealth sleep message. A series of art appreciation books from Julie Merberg and Suzanne Bober ends with sleep, like a Magical Day with Matisse (“Hearts full of song/and eyes shining bright,/we’ll play more tomorrow, but now it’s good night”) and Dancing with Degas (“Tired dancers/rest legs and feet/and dream of floating/off to sleep”) encourage the opposite of art appreciation: instead of engaging and thinking, we’re lulling. Even the most imaginative alphabet primers are forced to conclude in sleep, like P is for Pterodactyl, which ends with a sleeping zebra named Zhivago.
We might as well reinvent the Dewey Decimal System for Emerging Readers:
000: Weird-but-true facts about sleep
100: Dream interpretation
200: Mythological sleepers
300: Folk tales of naughty children who didn’t go to sleep
400: Alphabet primers not ending with “zebra”
500: Animals who look cute sleeping
600: Why your body needs sleep
700: Biographies of historical figures who once went to sleep
800: Poems to make you yawn
900: Pirates who go to sleep
This is not the case for grown-up books. Back in the before times when I could read uninterrupted, I started Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy. I will be very surprised if it ended with Marie brushing her teeth, putting on her pajamas, and climbing under the covers.
Parents are desperate for their kids to sleep. We read multiple guides about sleep-training, perfect the half-hour bedtime countdown, and invest in books about rabbits who want to fall asleep even though said rabbits look terrifying. Parents staring down months of social distancing apparently cleared out the stock of melatonin to keep bedtimes regular.
I’m not here to throw shade at parents desperately trying to trick or medicate the kids to sleep, because I have failed at all of these methods and have a recent kindergarten graduate whom I say goodnight to on my way to bed. Yes, parents want (and need) more alone time. Yes, kids appear to be sleep-deprived. Some soporific books have a place as part of a calming routine. But later, when we start saying that Johnny doesn’t like reading and would prefer his iPad to a book, we should at least consider our role in making reading so boring.
All bedtime story readers know that you can’t make a kid go to bed anyway. Many of our household favorites focus on sleep resistance: David Stein’s Interrupting Chicken, Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Bedtime for Mommy, Mo Willems’ Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late!
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom doesn’t conclude with cozy sleeping letters, but with “A is out of bed…” Oliver Jeffers’ Stuck seems to end with a very tired Floyd drifting off to sleep, but who “could have sworn there was something he was forgetting,” namely, all of the people and things he’d left up in the tree, and it's this very-much-awake crowd that gets the last word. Dr. Seuss’ Sleep Book is hardly a snoozer. There’s a fast-spreading yawn pandemic, followed by goose-and-moose juice-fueled nightmares, followed by salesmen who sleep to forget their failed Zizzer-Zoof sales. How can you not stay up thinking about the Collapsible Frink, or sleepwalking Curious Crandalls, or the World-Champion Sleep-Talkers, Jo and Mo Redd-Zoff?
