Childhood books are a staple in life. For some children, there are designated books for bedtime, snack time and when grandparents come to visit. Now, imagine if the books people were growing up reading were normalizing racist imagery to impressionable, young children, written by a famous children’s author known around the world, being the one spouting the racist portrayals. Dr. Seuss did just that.
Dr. Seuss Enterprises announced that it will quit publishing six of the author’s books, “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” “If I Ran the Zoo, McElligot’s Pool,” “On Beyond Zebra!,” “Scrambled Eggs Super!” and “The Cat’s Quizzer,” because of the hurtful images and lines in the children’s books that inaccurately depict people of African and Asian descent. The announcement was made on March 2, 2021, inciting a range of reactions. While one library in Chicago, Illinois, pulled all six books from their shelves, most Bay Area libraries did not.
According to First Things First, a childhood development organization, 90 percent of a child’s brain is developed by age five. Those five years are important for setting the foundation of a child’s thoughts and outlook on life. While adolescence is also often a time of major change, a developing toddler is highly “imprintable” by their experiences, making this a crucial period. Developing what’s “right” and “wrong” doesn’t happen overnight, but in the first few years of life, when kids have a lack of knowledge, they don’t know anything beyond what they’re told.
As Dr. Seuss’ books are intended for readers aged three to nine, the concern regarding racist imagery in his books, and the enterprise’s decision to stop publishing six of his books, sparked controversy.
In February 2024, the New York Times Ethicist, a column by Kwame Anthony Appiah that answers readers’ moral dilemmas, published a piece commenting on someone’s specific situation of reading an old Dr. Seuss book to their young child. From The New York Times, the prompt goes as follows: “Recently my aunt gifted me my father’s copy of Dr. Seuss’s “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” so I could read it to my 8-month-old son. The book was one of my father’s favorite books as a child, and he is so pleased to know that it has been passed along to his grandson. It is, I think, the original printing from 1937, has his name written in it and is colored in with crayons and pencils in various places. It was clearly a loved book. But the book also contains an egregious racial stereotype of a Chinese person. (The graphic and text were edited in the 1970s to make them less offensive.) I want to read this book to my son because it was special to my father, but I don’t want to imply that some of the content is OK. I could: get rid of the book; keep the book, but not read it to my son; read it to him but skip over the offensive text and image (I think this could be done without changing the story fairly easily); or read it to him as it is, in its entirety, and have a conversation with him as soon as he is able to understand the issue. None of these options feel quite right to me. Is there something I haven’t thought of? — L. Wagner, Brooklyn, N.Y.”
The prompt is an example of the complexities that the impact of children’s books brings up. How do we know if a child will be negatively impacted by the racist connotations in a book they read when they were six?
Students in Steve Hettleman’s Advanced Placement (AP) Language and Composition course are familiar with this prompt. Junior Theo Wang wrote an argument paragraph as a class assignment in response to Appiah’s column.
“I think that if [the books] are a part of history they don’t need to necessarily be scrapped, but I think that maybe in terms of who’s exposed to them, we should be a little more cautious, especially if they’re very openly anti-semitic or just offensive at all to a large group of people, that they shouldn’t be voluntarily exposed to a younger group of kids,” Wang said.
Kids develop all sorts of thoughts and social expectations at a young age. According to BJJ Mental Models, normalization is defined as two things. One of the definitions is “things we accept as commonplace.” When children consistently read and are confronted with the same stereotypes, by that definition, they become normalized.
World History and Advanced Placement (AP) World History teacher Corin Greenberg believes that the portrayals in Dr. Suess’s books warrant a societal discussion.
“I think taking something harmful down makes sense, [but] keeping it up and explaining the history makes sense. We just don’t want to promote things that we find harmful today. But I feel like there’s a few ways to do it, and I’m not really sure what’s the right way either. I think it’s good we’re having a social conversation about it as a society,” Greenberg said.
Greenberg visited a museum in England where she observed an interesting way to address historical records that current society would now find offensive.
“When I went to England two summers ago, [I noticed] they kept a lot of things up, like statues of people who had done harmful things or participated in the slave trade. But they put large plaques on them saying this person did this bad thing, and so it felt like the way they were approaching it in England was to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to keep this stuff up, but we’re also going to explain what happened.’ And to me, that felt sort of like a good way to do it,” Greenberg said.
Dr. Seuss’ six books containing images harmful to certain races are still available in libraries around the Bay Area, such as the Mill Valley Public Library which contains four of the six, and can still be found elsewhere. Yet, no more will be printed. The decision of whether parents read those books to their children is one for them to make.
Furthermore, according to Humanium, an independent, international organization that focuses on children’s rights, “Stories play an important role in children’s representation: they provide information and models, they guide the reader through the discovery of the world, both real and imaginary and they convey values such as friendship, empathy, courage, sense of belonging, emotions and diversity which are essential for child development and growth.” The ideas that children’s books convey can stay with a child.
Liana Frankos, Redwood’s Psychology Intern for the 2025-2026 school year, understands the impact of media on children and their development.
“When you expose [children] to things, they start taking that in and soaking it in like a sponge. If they are learning bad things in a book or through video games, they could learn aggression through video games, for example, but they could also learn kindness, communication skills and social skills through all this media as well. Children are like sponges, and they take in the world. So be cautious of what you put out there,” Frankos said.
Many children’s books are used as tools for life lessons. For example, “The Rainbow Fish” teaches about inclusiveness and kindness. “Beautiful Oops” shares the lesson of embracing mistakes. Simple stories can be used to instill life values in children. They can also set the bar for what children think is okay, concerning not only how they perceive themselves, but also others.
Children’s books have the potential to instill important values, but given younger children’s ages, books also have the power to normalize harmful ideas. The impact of media consumption, whether through books or not, can shape what children perceive as “normal” and therefore accepted in society and their own minds. Children’s books hold great power, and “Spider-Man Amazing Fantasy #15,” states “with great power there must also come – great responsibility!”
