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SUMMARY: There is no other book more closely associated with bedtime in children’s literature than Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, which is why it is our first choice for our Bedtime Book Series. In today’s episode, we talk about why Goodnight Moon isn’t just an academic favorite, but how this weird little book is actually quietly revolutionary and appeals to the interests and needs of even the smallest children. What’s more, we discuss how Goodnight Moon benefits your child’s cognitive and emotional development, in addition to helping him actually go the you-know-what to sleep, which is the ultimate and noble goal of all bedtime books!
Listen to the Podcast Episode:
Books Mentioned in this Episode:
Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Bumble Bugs and Elephants by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd
The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd
My World by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd
Over the Moon by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Clement Hurd
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Inside Picture Books by Ellen Handler Spitz
Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain by Dana Suskind, M.D.
A Book of Sleep by Il Sung Na
The Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Felicia Bond
In the Great Green Room: The Brilliant and Bold Life of Margaret Wise Brown by Amy Gary
“All of my Issues With the “Goodnight Moon” Bedroom” Article from The Ugly Volvo
Goodnight Moon Board Book
Goodnight Moon Giant Book
Podcast Transcript:
Hello Everybody! Today’s episode is the first of a little series that I’m going to be doing on bedtime books. All of the books I’ve chosen for this series are tried-and-true favorites in my family and, in addition to all of them being good for building your child’s brain, they will also help you to get your kids to actually go the you-know-what to sleep, which is the ultimate and noble goal of all bedtime books. This episode’s book is… Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd–because, of course, duh, it has to be Goodnight Moon. I don’t think there is any other book more closely associated with bedtime in children’s literature so I feel like we have to discuss it as the first of our bedtime book series or it would be like leaving out the marshmallow part of a s’more or something—it just binds everything together. Plus, real talk, it is actually the most-read bedtime book in my house—I think we’ve read it on average at least 3 times a week for the past 4 years, so it’s not just that it’s a classic choice, it’s a real-world choice as well. As usual, in the course of this episode, I will also mention a bunch of other books, like for example some books on language development and other bedtime books that my family and I enjoy, and if these interest you, don’t worry about having to pause or rewind to write them down; I always list all of the books that I mention on the episode, even the ones that are just mentioned in passing, in the shownotes. So you can just go to exquisitelyeverafter.com/episode15 and you’ll find that list.
Goodnight Moon
Before we dive into this book, I have to be honest and tell you, before I had kids of my own, I really didn’t “get” Goodnight Moon. I was like, yes, it’s a classic, but, like, why is everyone so obsessed with Goodnight Moon? I don’t know if you all have had this experience, and if you did or did not, let me know, but literally at every baby shower I have ever attended in my life, the expectant mother received at least one copy of Goodnight Moon. At my own baby shower, I received two: a board book version and a hardcover version, plus a Goodnight Moon illustration and a stuffed animal Goodnight Moon bunny, and these were added to my collection of Goodnight Moons that I already owned from my teaching days: I had a giant read-aloud version and a paperback version. And speaking of which, I read Goodnight Moon when I was a student in children’s literature classes in undergrad and then I read it again at Harvard as a Ph.D. grad student and then I taught Goodnight Moon when I was teaching undergraduates myself. SO MUCH GOODNIGHT MOON IN MY LIFE. And I really did like it, but, again, I have to be frank with you and tell you that I didn’t get it, get it until I started to read it aloud to my first child. Even though my parents read to me constantly when I was little—one of my earliest memories is me snuggled up next to my mom as she read aloud to me—I don’t remember having this particular book read to me as a child which is perhaps why, pre-my own kids I sort of lumped it into the category of an academic favorite and one that I personally liked as an adult, but probably not one of those books that would stand up when you actually read it to children. It’s weird in a quirky, interesting, literary way, but I privately equated it to, maybe, the works of William Faulkner: like, sure, okay, fine, I get why it’s “good” in a literary sense, but what kind of psychopath actually enjoys reading As I Lay Dying in real life? … Is this opinion too polarizing for this podcast? Whatever, I don’t care. I left academia partly so that I could make these kinds of statements without the threat of them coming up nine years later as a nail in the coffin of a tenure review. Anyway, this is a little exaggerated. I didn’t think Goodnight Moon was awful the way I think William Faulkner’s books are awful. I actually thought Goodnight Moon was really good, but I did kind of wonder how such a weird little book became a classic and who would read it to their children every night. And now, 4 years later, I realize the answer is: Me. It’s me. I am the person who reads it over and over again to my children and I am the person who is confident that it will remain a classic. And I’m confident because it actually is incredibly appealing to even very small children and it speaks to them and their interests and desires in a really unique, and profound, and decidedly not-condescending way. It IS absolutely super weird and at times almost verges on the creepy, but now I’m totally here for it. It’s not like a Faulkner book, but rather it’s like the Alice in Wonderland of picture books, if you will: a literary, academic favorite that actually holds up under the scrutiny of real children.
Okay, so if you are not familiar with Goodnight Moon or you dismissed it as creepy AF and so avoided reading it (which, again, is a totally fair first impression), basically, here’s what the book is about at face value: There is a bunny in pajamas who looks around his enormous room and bids goodnight to various objects and non-objects before going to sleep. That’s it. A bunny goes to bed. It really couldn’t be any simpler. And if you flip through the book to look at the illustrations created by Clement Hurd, you will notice that the nursery looks a lot like a colorblind and childless middle-aged man decorated it: the walls are a bright Kelly green, the floor is a lurid tomatoey sort of red and, among other bizarre things, there is a huge open fireplace in the room, a bookcase full of what looks like giant encyclopedias, an enormous tiger skin rug right next to the little bunny’s bed, a couple of naked dolls, a tiny mouse, and a drying rack. It’s bonkers. There is a hilarious article about this room called “All of my issues with the “Goodnight Moon” bedroom” in a blog called The Ugly Volvo that you should absolutely check out because I think this woman can see into my soul. I’m totally the mouse Tanya from “An American Tail” that she’s talking about at the end of her article. I’ll link it in the shownotes. Anyway, that’s what you might get at face value when you skim through Goodnight Moon, but now we’re going to look at why this book is actually quietly revolutionary and, what’s more, is excellent for your child’s cognitive and emotional development (in addition to, you know, helping him actually go to sleep):
First of all, despite my being a little facetious about it a couple of seconds ago, the simple, straightforward plot of the story is one of the reasons that this book is perfect for bedtime. Margaret Wise Brown actually formally studied to be a writer for children and in the 1930s she worked with one of the leading proponents of the “Here and Now” philosophy, which is the idea that stories for children should be about real, everyday settings and things, and that they should be written by taking into account the unique way a child observes and responds to her environment. The influence of this philosophy on Brown’s writing and the way she viewed the child’s imagination is evident from the very first page when the narrator begins: “In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon and a picture of— (page turn) the cow jumping over the moon…” and you are immediately thrust into the perspective of a child: To small children, all rooms are larger than perhaps what they seem to an adult (although this particular room does seem massive to me, too) and also, I like that it’s not “In the great nursery room” or “In the bunny’s bedroom” but instead Brown identifies the room by its color–also a very childlike thing to do. It also makes the room a bit more enigmatic in the way that, for children, places and things are not yet familiar to them since they are so young and every place and everything is new to them. Children haven’t grown accustomed to things like we adults have; for them, nothing is predictable and even their bedrooms are just another place to explore, full of interesting things they might not have noticed yet.
And speaking of noticing interesting things, the telephone, the red balloon, and the picture of the cow jumping over the moon are absolutely things that would draw the attention of any child, anywhere, at any time. (As a quick side note: it’s actually amazing how well this book has aged and how well Brown could predict what would continue to appeal to children. For example, if there is a phone or a balloon in the room, my children will zero in on it immediately and I’m sure most of your kids are the same way, too.) Brown then takes us through the room, helping us to notice the other particularly interesting things in it. From the cow jumping over the moon, we naturally shift our attention to the other picture in the room of the three bears sitting on chairs and then to the other animals in the room, the kittens, and then to the rhyming “mittens” and so on. There is the little toy house and then, just casually, a young mouse (?!) who causes no alarm but is just there, hanging out. And then there’s the comb, brush, the mush and the person who is probably responsible for putting the mush there, a quiet old bunny lady who is whispering, of course, “hush,” because some variation of “hush” is always the word implored by watchful adults at bedtime.
What I like here is that Clement Hurd draws some of the items in the room up close, as if he is following the child’s eye and zeroing in on them to study them better. Small children love to get a closer look. My toddler sons would yank books so close to their faces that they would bump their little noses on them. And if your child shows an inclination to get closer, by all means, let him press his little face up to the book or bat at it with his hand or use his fingers to scratch against the page. Just because books are two-dimensional doesn’t mean they shouldn’t work as a multisensory experience that includes touch.
Okay, let’s talk continue talking about the illustrations because they are so distinct and have become just as iconic as the text. What is so interesting to me is that, before he happened to meet Margaret Wise Brown by chance, Clement Hurd wasn’t an illustrator let alone an illustrator of children’s books or even interested in illustrating books at all. He was actually a commercial artist living in New York while Brown was an editor for W. R. Scott, a children’s book publisher. Brown just happened to see two of Hurd’s paintings and she asked him if he’d consider illustrating children’s books and the rest is history. It’s like a classic 1930s meet-cute except in a literary way. Their first collaboration was Bumble Bugs and Elephants in 1938, then The Runaway Bunny in 1942, and then Goodnight Moon in 1947. The Runaway Bunny, Goodnight Moon, and My World are the three companion books that comprise what is known as Brown and Hurd’s “classic series” and the three books have been published together in a collection entitled Over the Moon. The books really don’t rely on each other to be understood or anything, but it’s amusing to notice the little nods or homages to The Runaway Bunny that Hurd slipped into his Goodnight Moonillustrations. For example, the painting of the bunny fishing on the wall of the great green room is actually an image from The Runaway Bunny; and the illustration of the cow jumping over the moon is the same illustration of that nursery rhyme that first appeared in The Runaway Bunny; and there is also an actual copy of the book The Runaway Bunny on the Goodnight Moon Bunny’s bookshelf. If you look closely, you can read the title in tiny print. It’s fun when your kids pick up on this. When my older son James realized that the bunny in the picture was the same as The Runaway Bunny, he was so delighted and it was, you know, very cool to see how his little brain started reframing the book when he asked questions like, “Is that the same bunny? Is this his house? Are those bunnies friends?” … But then he asked “But where is the Mommy bunny? Why isn’t she in the room?” So, yes, on second thought, now I remember that those questions were kind of stressful for me, so I don’t know, tread carefully, but still, anyway, it was interesting to see his little brain at work.
Anyway, back to the illustrations. What I like is that besides just drawing some of the objects larger and up close, Hurd also made them black and white, which further distinguishes them but also extends the target age range of this book from just being appropriate for toddlers to also include infants. As we’ve learned in previous episodes, infants really respond to black and white images because of the high contrast they provide to help stimulate a baby’s developing vision. Plus, when they actually can start seeing color, they like bright, pure colors like vibrant reds and blues and yellows over pastels. So obviously, this circus tent of a room really fits that bill as well. If you want to learn more about this, check out Episode #5: Best Books for Newborns and How to Read Them (I’ll link it in the shownotes). Anyway, the point is that Goodnight Moon can be one of the first books that you read to your babies and thus it can become a part of your nighttime routine from early on in their lives, which, on an emotional level, reading the same story every night can be very comforting to small children. (As a related side note, if you look closely, there is actually a copy of Goodnight Moon on the little bunny’s nightstand, as if he is reading this book every night, too, which is very meta but also I think smart and subtle product placement. Like, “Look Reader, the bunny ALSO reads this book to be comforted before bed!” There’s Clement Hurd’s commercial art background shining through).
I could talk about all of the interesting and unsettling things that Hurd put in the garish green room for hours. Like, for example, why are the dolls naked? Is it because in this scenario, bunnies are the clothed civilized ones and humans are the stuffed animals and so they don’t need clothes? Is this like Animal Farm, but for sleepy toddlers? Am I reading too much into this? Probably. Anyway, I won’t talk about this for hours, because, who has that kind of time? But I just want to highlight two more things that I think are important. First, I like the way that Hurd draws the mouse in different locations throughout the book. It’s fun to have your child search for it and notice what the mouse is doing in each of the successive images, ending with it gazing out the window at the risen moon. Second, I love that as the story progresses, the moon rises in the window and the room becomes dimmer and dimmer until the only light comes from the moon, the fireplace, and the windows of the little house. Again, there is comfort in this gentle, gradual darkening of the room for your child. It shows her that nighttime and darkness don’t have to be this abrupt and scary transition. Even though the quiet old lady and the kittens have left, there is still object permanence, the room is still just as it was before, and it will remain that way until the bunny wakes up. Dr. Ellen Handler Spitz has written a really excellent book called Inside Picture Books that talks about the way that Goodnight Moon uses object permanence to teach children “that life can be trusted, that life has stability, reliability, and durability.” If you’re interested in reading more about this perspective on Goodnight Moon or about the relationship among art, psychology, and children’s literature, I highly recommend that you check out her book. I’ll link it in the shownotes.
Okay, so that’s it for the illustrations, at least for this episode, but before we move on to the story in depth, this is probably a good place to pause and talk about a few different ways you can read Goodnight Moon aloud to your kids to help promote their cognitive growth:
First, and most obviously, as you list the things mentioned in the story, have your child seek them out on the page and point to them. If you have a child who is too little to point on his own, you can take his hand in yours and help him to point. Not only is identifying objects good for children who are learning new words, but every time you read this book, this action of pointing becomes part of a familiar routine for your child, helping him to take ownership of the book and the story and make it uniquely his own. Goodnight Moon is a particularly great book because the way it is written and illustrated allows your reading experience and your child’s reading experience to grow and change as he grows and changes. When I read this to my boys when they were each a young toddler, we settled into a particular way of reading it that involved pausing after each object to find it and point to it. When I said, for example, “And there were three little bears, sitting on chairs” I added, “one, two, three” pointing to each bear and “one, two, three” pointing to each chair. Initially, at the beginning of this stage, I’d take my little guy’s finger in my hand and help him to point to each bear and each chair, but as he got older, he would point himself and say “one, two, three.” This is a really easy way to incorporate numbers and counting into your day and you may not think it makes any difference, but when your child is older and you are teaching him to count, that action of pointing to one object in order to separate it from another will already be a familiar process in his brain.
Additionally, you can ask your child to notice other things in the room, either by making it a seek and find activity by asking her to find a particular object (like, “Which one is the comb?”) OR by asking your child, “What else do you see in the room?” and letting her point out and talk about the things that grab her attention. And you can even do this with very young toddlers or infants who can’t yet talk back to you or who have a limited vocabulary. For example, a conversation with my infant or toddler son might go something like this: I would say, “Do you see a toy elephant in this room? Let’s see if we can find it…” (and then my son searches the page and locates the elephant and touches it with his finger) And then I would say something like: “Yes! There it is! It’s sitting on that shelf next to that pink doll. You have a baby doll in your room, too, don’t you? … Where is she?” (and then we’d look around and he points to the doll) And then I’d say: “Oh, yes, there she is, next to your crib! Hello, Baby!” (and then we’d wave to the baby and my son repeats “Hello, Baby!”) And then I’d say something like: “Okay, should we turn the page and see what’s next?” This type of reading is called “dialogic reading” and its goal is to encourage children to take a more active role in the reading experience by allowing them to interact with you and the book, ask questions, and talk about what they see, think, and feel. All of these conversations that you have with your child while reading are important for laying the foundation for your child’s communication skills and helping to build your child’s brain. And if you’d like to read more about dialogic reading, there is a great chapter about it in Dr. Dana Suskind’s book Thirty Million Words, which we’ve discussed before on this podcast. It’s in Episode #4. I’ll link it in the shownotes.
However, just as a side note, because I realize that having an in-depth conversation every night and every time you turn the page seems really daunting if not just downright onerous, just be aware that you don’t have to do this every time you read the book in order to help build your child’s brain. Sometimes children, especially if they’re already tired, just want to sit and listen and have a more passive experience. And that’s totally okay. Or I personally find that if we are reading a new book, sometimes my children prefer to read the book once through before they interject or ask questions. BUT, if you are trying to get your child to settle down for bedtime and he is trying to wriggle out of your arms or otherwise having trouble calming himself, even though it seems counterintuitive, making your bedtime reading more interactive by asking questions and having your child point to things or asking him to repeat goodnight to the objects is actually a good way to help him to slow down, focus, and settle himself. And because this book is so easily committed to memory due to its near rhymes and its simple and rhythmic text, you can pause and let your child fill in the words for you, which is another way for your child to slow down and focus without it requiring too much effort on his part—or on your part. This is one of the reasons why Goodnight Moon isn’t just great in an abstract, literary way, but is truly excellent for parents who are actually trying to get their children to go to sleep.
I don’t know if you’ve had this experience, but sometimes if bedtime was delayed and I allowed my children to reach that dreaded point where they were so overtired that they were wound up and literally bouncing off the walls, it would be super difficult to get them to sit still while doing the bedtime reading. They’d be squirming around, resisting the snuggle because they knew if they slowed down, they’d fall asleep. It’s like, and bear with me on this metaphor, but it’s like that whole myth about sharks needing to keep swimming so they don’t die. I feel like children have this same innate sense of urgency when they know they’ve been awake too long so they try to keep moving at all costs so as not to fall asleep. So, anyway, to remedy this situation where my toddlers would be trying to launch themselves off my lap in an effort to stave off sleepiness, I always reached for Goodnight Moon because I knew that if I could just manage to get them to sit still for the first couple of lines, I would “have them” and I could turn the ship around. So, I’d say (loudly) to my wriggling toddler: “In the great green room, there was…” and then I would pause, and he would, almost like it was an involuntary action for him that he couldn’t resist, insert “a telephone,” and then I’d say quickly, “and a red balloon… where is the red balloon?” And he’d point almost unwillingly to the balloon and I’d say “Yes! There it is!” and then I’d quickly move on to “and a picture of…” and he’d say “the cow jumping over the moon!” And, bam, he was hooked. Honestly, I get why someone once called this book an incantation because it really was like casting a spell on my child. He’d flip the switch from squirmy, overtired toddler, to attentive, contented toddler in the space of just a few seconds. And I’d be like, how the heck did that just happen … but never mind let’s not think about it and just be grateful, Christina. And I’m telling you this story because this worked with not only with my first child, but it also works with my second, so I am hoping that it might also work for your child and Goodnight Moon can help you deal with these difficult bedtime moments if you have them too.
Okay, moving on, let’s get back to the story itself. So. After looking around the room and meeting some of the items in it, we get to the dramatic part of the story where everything burns up because of the dangerously open fireplace and its proximity to the mittens. Just kidding. Sometimes I make up alternate endings for books that I’ve read 4,000 times just to keep it interesting for myself. You don’t do this? Just me? (just me…)
So, anyway, after we look around the room and meet some of the objects, the pacing of the book suddenly slows and we begin to say goodnight. The language from this point onward is direct and… I think the best word for it would maybe be “conclusive” in that everything seems to placidly move toward a contented, final goodnight and the page turns are slow. And what I mean by slow page turns is that Brown and Hurd and whoever their art director was cleverly decided to leave room for pauses. “Goodnight room,” we say and then we look to the opposite page, but there are no words, so we have another beat of silence before we turn the page. So it’s “Goodnight room……Goodnight moon.” This is really effective for a bedtime book because it signals to the reader and, most importantly, to the child listener to slow down, to take a breath, and to settle in for the night. There are a couple of other books that I can think of that are marketed as bedtime books, but the pacing is just so fast that they don’t really have a soporific effect like this book. I can think of just one other similarly paced book as Goodnight Moon off the top of my head that has this sleep-inducing quality and that’s Il Sung Na’s A Book of Sleep. And, I mean, just to clarify some of these other bedtime books are great books, but they are just not as directly sleep-inducing.
Okay, so after our first goodnight to the room at large, we start zeroing in on the things within and without it. And here is where Brown’s peculiar genius shines through again because as we say goodnight, she gives us moments of surprise by saying goodnight to things that we didn’t notice before… as well as things that might seem a bit bizarre or unsettling to us adults, like “air” and “nobody,” but that children, who don’t categorize things the way we do, wouldn’t think twice about including in their list of things to which to say goodnight. In this way, Brown gives us adults unanticipated moments of insight into a young child’s mind and its preoccupations and associations while simultaneously validating those preoccupations and associations for the child. It’s so subtle, but it’s so ingenious. And, personally, I like to think that Brown is almost conspiring with the child here, like, hey kid, you and I notice these things and think they’re perfectly natural but watch this: your parents are totally going to be creeped out by saying goodnight to nobody.
Okay, so back to the child’s associations and preoccupations during the repetition of “goodnight.” Right off the bat, even though we didn’t greet the moon initially, here it is in the window, a near rhyme for “Goodnight room,” and so we say goodnight to it and then, again in the spirit of association and rhyme, we move on to another moon. If you were just reading this without pictures you might think that the words “Goodnight Moon. … Goodnight cow jumping over the moon” are just an elaboration and a repetition, but actually Brown and Hurd are giving us two moons, the real and the imagined: the distant full moon outside the bedroom window and the fanciful nursery rhyme moon in the wall picture which is a curved sliver and has a cow vaulting over it like a high-jumper. Here, when we say goodnight to the moons, Brown and Hurd give us another window into the child’s mind, how it locates and identifies one moon outside and then naturally, associatively flits back inside to identify the other one, figuring out how language signifiers work and how the real and imaginary can coexist. These are things that we as adults take for granted, but that children are discovering and processing for the first time. It’s Brown particular gift that she is able to remember what it’s like to see the world and discover the way it works as a child would. And while I think she was naturally able to do this, it’s also important to note here that she also worked hard to keep or hone this ability. For example, one little anecdote that I loved when reading her biography was when, to make sure she got animal noises and habits just right for her book The Big Red Barn, she actually slept overnight in a barn. That’s commitment. And in case you want to know, her biography is called In the Great Green Room and I highly recommend it. Margaret Wise Brown was such a fascinating person and had such a crazy life that it’s a surprisingly excellent and entertaining read. I’ll link it in the shownotes.
Okay, back to the book: from the two moons, we move on to the light and the red balloon and what I like here is that Brown diverts again from a wholly predictable structure or rhyme scheme, not bothering to make sure that the book is symmetrical. Even though there is a lot of repetition (“bears and chairs” “kittens and mittens” “house and mouse”), which as we know, young children do love, Brown breaks the rules with some unexpected variation and in this way gives us something a bit more complicated, which children also appreciate. This unpredictability makes Goodnight Moon”more memorable than other straightforward rhyming picture books with neat symmetry and mundane, predictable objects. It’s still poetic, but in a more sophisticated way. And, again, this is great for your child’s developing brain. When something unexpected happens linguistically, the brain lights up in response because it is trying to make sense of it. This kind of stimulation is beneficial to long-term cognitive functioning because the brain is actively learning something new about the way language works. And, as an added bonus, this kind of active learning, where the brain isn’t just passively receiving information, is also neuroprotective; in other words, it protects the brain from degenerating. Which maybe seems kind of like overkill for little kids, like giving a 23-year-old anti-aging wrinkle cream, but, whatever, it can’t hurt. There was also a study done in 2013 at the University of Exeter that showed that poetry stimulates the parts of the brain that are linked to our resting states (the posterior cingulate cortex and the medial temporal lobes), which means that poetry is linked to the part of a network of brain regions that are active when we are at rest, just sitting or relaxing, when the brain is reflecting upon something or daydreaming. This apparently fosters a sense of personal connection to a poem or creates a sense of self-reflection, which can be great when you are trying to establish a bedtime routine that includes a particular book that will help your child relax and that will promote an atmosphere of calm introspection. Okay. Again, I know this seems like a lot for one little book about a bunny going to bed. If your family is anything like mine, “an atmosphere of calm introspection” is not how I would describe our nighttime routine and we read Goodnight Moon all the time. However, again, as I mentioned earlier, I do think that this book has helped my children during the transition from wide-awake and bouncing off the walls to accepting that it is time to calm down and settle in for the night and it is probably because of the way their brains are reacting to Brown’s words and Hurd’s illustrations. But the best news is, you don’t have to think about any of this when you are actually reading Goodnight Moon to your child. All you have to know is that you are helping to build your child’s brain even while you are in the process of getting your child to sleep. So, yay! I consider that a win.
Finally, and most importantly for a bedtime book, Brown uses the repetition of “goodnights” to imitate the way our minds actually work when we fall asleep, our thoughts drifting from one thing to the next, sometimes following a clear course, sometimes randomly diverting, until they finally slow down, and we fall asleep. As I said earlier, reviewers have called this book less a story than an “incantation,” as if Brown is magically doing something to her readers to make them sleepy, and I think this is why: Brown is less concerned with making something structurally perfect than with casting a spell over her readers by making them experience first-hand that slightly unmoored feeling that humans have when we are just about to slip into sleep. With Goodnight Moon Brown replicates how the brain progressively disengages from the external world and our thoughts drift away from us as she moves us from the concrete things in the room to saying goodnight to the stars and then to the air and then finally ends with “Goodnight noises everywhere,” as if our eyes are now closed and the last thing we perceive are the quiet sounds around us.
And one last thing. I really like that the book isn’t tied up neatly with the old lady whispering hush, demanding that the bunny fall asleep. And I also like that the illustrations reflect this subtle autonomy: the bunny is in his bed, alone, in the darkened room. He has stopped moving around on the bed to look at the various things in the room and instead he is curled up cozily, the covers are tucked up around his neck and his eyes are almost closed. He is still awake, but he is at rest. So Brown and Hurd give us the idea that he is allowing sleep to take over. This is, of course, super subtle and it might seem like I’m making more of it than it is, but I think it’s really great that this book ends with the bunny himself accepting that it’s time to sleep. It’s like how all the sleep experts tell us to put our babies to bed: to not let them actually fall asleep on us and then put them in their cribs when they are unconscious, but to lull them to the point where they are almost asleep and then place them in their cribs so that they get used to falling asleep on their own and they don’t start to subconsciously fear sleeping by themselves. Anyway, even if this isn’t what Brown and Hurd intended, it’s excellent for your child to see an example of another child (even a bunny child) calmly going to bed. Psychologically, Goodnight Moon is a really reassuring book for a child. If we go back to Dr. Ellen Handler Spitz for a second, she tells us that falling asleep can either be welcomed or feared and, in any case, is an experience that is normally met with a mixture of emotions. So, it’s helpful for us as parents and caregivers to read books to our children that can ease these tensions that can crop up during this transition from awake to asleep. From a psychological perspective, Ellen Handler Spitz tells us that Goodnight Moon conveys a comforting knowledge to children that even though they relinquish some of their powers when they go to sleep, they and their world and the people who love and care for them will remain intact and be there when they wake up.
So there it is, Goodnight Moon, a classic bedtime book that actually makes good on its promise and makes your child feel secure and sleepy. I’m not going to comment on which of those two things I think is more important after a long day of chasing around my toddler and my 4-year-old, but I think you can probably guess.
And that’s it for this episode of the Exquisitely Ever After podcast! How do you feel about Goodnight Moon? Do you think it’s overrated and/or creepy or has it won you over like it won me over? And I’m also curious to know if it was a part of your childhood reading or did you first come across it as an adult? And, lastly, I’d also love to know: what are some of your other favorite bedtime books to read with your kids? As I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, I’m going to do a continuing series of bedtime book episodes that I’ll sprinkle throughout each season of the podcast and though I have a bunch that I’m excited to talk about, I’m always on the hunt for another favorite. So, if you have one, please send me an email at christina@exquisitelyeverafter.com or you can dm me on Instagram at exquisitelyeverafter or you can leave me a comment on the blog post for this episode at exquisitelyeverafter.com/episode15. And as always, you can also find a complete list of all the books that were mentioned today, even the ones that I just mentioned in passing, in the shownotes, again at exquisitelyeverafter.com/episode15. And if you liked this episode or this podcast in general, please do subscribe, it’s totally free and by subscribing you ensure that you don’t miss any new episodes. AND if you have a minute, please leave me a review or a rating on iTunes or share this episode with a friend via text. For a new show like mine, it helps so much. I really appreciate that you took time to listen to me talk about children’s literature today! Thanks so much again, everyone! Take care, keep safe, and of course, keep reading!
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[…] you missed it and you’d like to begin with a classic bedtime book, you can go back and listen to Episode 15. This week’s book is not a classic, but rather a very recent book that was published in July […]