Anastasia Higginbotham’s first book opens with an image of a child holding a glass of milk. The sky outside is partly cloudy, but still blue. A speech bubble floats in from off the page with a parent’s words: “We have something to tell you.”
The particular “something” can be discerned from the book’s title, “Divorce Is the Worst.” But similar scenes of foreboding are playing themselves out in millions of homes during the novel coronavirus pandemic, as most of the nation’s children are home from school and parents across the country are wrestling with how to explain things we don’t yet fully understand ourselves.
Ms. Higginbotham has spent the last five years creating tools to do just that. In “Ordinary Terrible Things,” her series of children’s books, young people seek understanding in the midst of tragedy or confusion. While none of the books explicitly tackle life during a pandemic, they “are about all the same things this crisis is about,” she said recently.
For example, what do you do “when adults say it’ll be OK” but children “can see in their eyes or overhear in their conversations that it might also not be OK?”
The series consists of four books so far: “Divorce Is the Worst”; “Death Is Stupid”; “Tell Me About Sex, Grandma”; and “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness.” The books’ young protagonists are offered “no spin, no false assurances, no superhero on the way,” Ms. Higginbotham said. Instead, they confront things “exactly as they are.” (She recommends the books for ages 4 and up, with the exception of “Not My Idea,” which is for ages 8 and above.)
Ms. Higginbotham’s artwork is disarmingly simple: words handwritten on pieces of brown paper bags, outfits created from scraps of cloth, scenery cut from the pages of magazines. She said the D.I.Y. feel makes her work more emotionally accessible. Her young readers “see the glue. They see that it’s just strips of fabric.” They think to themselves: I could do this.
Her books are also light on plot and character. They resist exposition and resolution. They have a subjective, almost dreamlike quality. They read more like poems than narratives.
But her unconventional approach yields honest depictions of struggle, like a depressed parent asleep under a blanket on the couch. She also provides bracing clarity, such as the moment in “Death Is Stupid” where she writes, “beware of the lies” right before a well-meaning adult says that a child’s deceased grandmother is “only sleeping.”
“Don’t say that to me,” the child replies, with both palms up, as if to fend off the euphemism. “Sleep is what I do and I wake up every morning. My gramma isn’t asleep. She died.”
Ms. Higginbotham said the scene was the result of a conversation she had with a funeral home director, one of many “authorities” she’s consulted in creating the series. The director told Ms. Higginbotham that she overheard a lot of conversations about death, but never intervened — unless an adult told a child that a deceased relative was sleeping. This could be a damaging lie, especially if the child then saw the person buried.
The current crisis, in which Covid-19 keeps forcing our mortality into our consciousness, is “a chance to learn how to grieve, how to be uncertain, how to find and keep a sense of humor, stay playful, and still take seriously what is very serious,” Ms. Higginbotham said.
Her publisher, Dottir Press, created a version of “Death Is Stupid” as a PDF that anyone can download free during these next months, she said.
Still, it can be hard to know just how far to go when exploring these topics with kids. “Sometimes parents think that they have to wait until a child asks a question,” said Mary Jo Podgurski, a veteran sex educator and another of Ms. Higginbotham’s authorities.
But, Dr. Podgurski said, kids are often curious about topics long before they voice that curiosity. “What we can do, if we’re wise, is give them the chance to really see what they need in the moment.”
This approach requires relinquishing a certain amount of control. “People have to have the courage,” Dr. Podgurski said, “to admit that their child might want to learn” about these topics.
Loretta Ross, a proponent of reproductive rights and visiting associate professor at Smith College, was one of the experts to whom Ms. Higginbotham turned for advice on “Not My Idea,” her book about white supremacy. “Children deserve the truth from their parents, and not the continuation of fairy tales,” she said. “You may want to tell your kid about Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and the Tooth Fairy.” But, she said, you shouldn’t deny the realities, like racism, that they can see with their own eyes. (Ms. Higginbotham said that her conversations with Ms. Ross alone caused her to revise at least 20 pages of her manuscript.)
Gisel Saillant teaches sixth-grade social studies at a public middle school in Cambridge, Mass. She used to be frustrated that the white children in her class approached conversations about race as thought experiments. “I didn’t want to have my students leave sixth grade without discomfort,” she said. “That’s part of their learning.”
Ms. Higginbotham’s book “Not My Idea” changed that. “It completely elevated a lot of the discussions in my classroom,” she said.
In one scene, a security guard in a store ignores a white child and instead eyes a black child suspiciously. But the guard is a person of color, which prompted a discussion in Ms. Saillant’s class about internalized racism.
When Ms. Saillant posted about her use of the book on Instagram, Emily Stobbe was inspired to follow suit. She teaches sixth-grade English at a public charter school in St. Louis, Mo. Ms. Stobbe paired “Not My Idea” with John Lewis’s “March,” a graphic memoir of the civil rights movement.
Ms. Stobbe said her students responded well to the book, in part because they are often “starved” for such difficult conversations. She said the students felt it was validating “to hear that adults aren’t always telling us the truth.”
According to Ms. Higginbotham, parents have a tendency to either under- or overexpose their kids to challenges: We keep them in a bubble, or we toughen them up. But both approaches are designed to bypass the experience of actually being upset.
“Isn’t there another way?” she asked. “Which is to see what’s happening, feel what’s happening, be connected to what’s happening. To understand your own experience and have support for that.”
Given the relentless stream of news, there’s a temptation right now to numb ourselves. But Ms. Higginbotham’s work reminds us that, even if we ignore reality, our kids are still seeing it and feeling it.
It has taken her decades to find the words she wished she’d had back when she was finding out, while drinking a glass of milk, that her parents were separating, and her father was going to move out.
“I really want to invite children into the fullness of an emotional life. Give them that language so that they can fully experience what their lives are. There’s no point at which their lives are going to become more real. It’s real now,” she said. “We forget how real it is. And I feel like childhood just never, ever leaves you.”
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