Ep 09 | Twaddle Dee and Twaddle Dum
Twaddle is such a funny word, and yet, it can strike fear into the heart of any new homeschooling mom. What if we pick the wrong books? Will our children ever recover? Will they love silly, idle talk and hideous illustrations? We worry we’ll ruin everything if we accidentally let a piece of twaddle through the door. We are, after all, the bookshelf gatekeepers.
So we set out to find the best of books, something Charlotte Mason moms refer to as ‘living books.’ But that’s almost just as hard to define. Every mom has a different list of living books and it’s easy to wonder if ‘living book’ just means ‘old book.’
But rather than fret or freeze when trying to choose books for our children, let’s work on gathering a few key characteristics of twaddle and living books so we’re able to quickly discern what’s best, what’s good, and what’s twaddle.
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PS. Bonus! I’ve made a video resource to bring this conversation down to the dirt. I grabbed a few books off my kids’ shelves to show you how I quickly assess a book to figure out if it’s likely to be a living book or twaddle. You can find it below.
HEY-OH!
A VIDEO RESOURCE FOR YOU:
Episode Notes
Continuing Education Picks
‘Toward a Definition of a Living Book,’ Colleen Manning
How to Do a Read Aloud [Spoof Video]
‘Favorite Read-Aloud Books for Preschoolers,’ Simply Charlotte Mason
Classical Heavyweight
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
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READ THE TRANSCRIPT
Twaddle.
It’s a funny little word, and honestly, so fun to say, but it can strike fear into the heart of any CM mom. Early on, we get the vibe that our children should never read any twaddle, that it might just destroy them if they do.
But it’s difficult to find a single working definition for twaddle. Ask one mom and she’ll answer any book with uninspiring or repetitive language. Ask another and she’ll say something about unworthy and unlovable characters. Ask one more and she’ll inform you that twaddle is a concept for all of life, including but not limited to books, movies, songs, and daily activities.
At that point, it’s likely you’ll start asking yourself if Crayola is twaddle and maybe your kids do need those twig-like crayons I lovingly poked fun at in Ep 00.
Don’t worry. You can choose your crayons with joy.
But the twaddle conversation can bring about a certain level of paralysis for the new homeschooling mom. We’re worried about choosing a book that leads our children’s minds down the path of what is akin to a potato chip and Coca-cola diet. What if they never recover? We’re stumped by the book our child eagerly asks to bring home from the library, trying to assess the quality of the idea therein in under thirty seconds while another child climbs the library shelf and the other plays in the trash can. Isn’t there some sort of twaddle cheat sheet? Or a list of the only books we should ever read?
Well, no. I don’t have a cheat sheet or a perfect book list, but I do have something better: some principles. And like I’ve been saying all season: if you can get those principles in your mind, you’ll be able to flesh them out in your home with an ever-growing confidence.
But before we really get started today, let me draw your attention to the episode title, which while sounding fun is actually a reminder for us all.
Twaddle dee and twaddle dum is a play on the characters Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum from the movie Alice in Wonderland. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum appear before Alice with the tale of the Curious Oyster in order to scare her into right behavior. They’re the perfect picture of adults who misuse stories for their own means. Rather than tell Alice a story that offers an inspiring idea, they try to play on her emotions to force a point.
Parents do this too.
We’re quick to hinder the imagination and squash curiosity with moralistic instruction. We dumb down knowledge to ensure we get our point across and our desired outcomes.
And that’s a twaddle parent.
It’s also a twaddle book.
And we don’t want either of those in our homes.
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There’s this book at the library that keeps appearing by my side in the pink-loving hands of my daughter. You should know that she gravitates towards anything pink—it doesn’t matter if it’s a toilet bowl brush or dog treats.
When we roll up to the second floor of the library, I release my children into the shelves of books and wait to see what they find. I want to give them some credit; they’re actually pretty good at picking out books based on the illustrations and most of the time I’m able to say yes to their picks.
But there’s this one book. And she finds it, every time.
Her questions have moved on from “Can I get this book?” to “Why did you say I can’t get this book?” and we have the same discussion again. She points out that the title includes the word ‘baby’ and babies are wonderful. She notes the princess-like outfit on the front and says she loves fairytales. She makes her case in all seriousness and I enjoy the process. Because it shows that she is picking up on certain characteristics of living books. But, with this politically-driven, dumbed-down, pink book; she’s trying to find gold in a pile of poop.
(Side note: my kids do listen to these episodes before they release and I’m certain they will be delighted I just said poop. Twice. I have normal children too.)
So what does a mother do when she finds herself face to face with the twaddley sort? Well, I used to hide said books and try to distract them as I moved them out of the library or secretly donate those books after they went to bed, but then I realized my children weren’t learning to distinguish twaddle from living books and they felt betrayed and upset when I passed along their books without telling them.
So now, I talk about it with my children. I’ll plop down next to them and ask them questions about the book. With my oldest, because she can read a little bit, I’ll ask her about the language: Does the book keep repeating the same phrase? What is this page about? Is that a true idea? Is that an idea at all? I’ll point to the illustrations and ask the kids to tell me what’s happening. Is the character winsome? Selfish? Cartoonish? I invite them to consider if their imaginations and souls see something sparkling within the pages of a book or if the book is dead.
And here’s the thing: kids are really good at this sort of book reviewing.
Miss Mason said that there is never a time in a child’s life that they are unequal to worthy thoughts, well-put or inspiring tales, well-told. And I repeatedly find that my children want the better books and ideas when given the tools to discover them.
I studied in Florence, Italy for a bit in college, and I remember hearing that the run-of-the-mill bedtime book for Italian children is...Dante’s Inferno.
Ignoring that Dante is an Italian treasure, children listen to the Inferno like it’s nothing. This blew my mind because I knew college students who couldn’t keep up with the Inferno. I continued to ask myself: Didn’t they have children’s books? Something more age-appropriate? Some cute story about a pasta noodle going to the duomo and floating down the Arno river with his friends gelato and pizza?
I sorely underestimated children. Which is what we do as a society.
We often think that children need special books. Ones they’ll be able to understand. Ones that appeal to their aesthetic tastes, which must mean cartoonish and an unrealistic color palette. It’s similar to how we think children need special foods, or kid-food, which is usually just a cover word for junk food. Adults eat nutrient-dense meals but kids need carby, sugary, fatty food or else they won’t like it. Well, that’s obviously illogical. Kids do not have special taste buds that prohibit them from enjoying better foods; their tastes just need to be developed, just like any adult.
Children are born persons, fully human already, so they were made for goodness, truth, and beauty. And that’s the key principle to remember when assessing a book. Honestly, one of the easiest ways for me to decide if a book is worthwhile is to ask myself: would I enjoy it? Because, as CS Lewis said, “A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
This, of course, doesn’t mean you can’t read picture books or have children’s stories. I actually enjoy a great number of our picture books because they’re beautiful in language, illustration, and ideas. They’re what we call: living books.
But before we head there, here’s the quick reference guide to sniffing out twaddle:
*the book will have uninteresting characters
*there will be repetitive plot lines or a lack of plot altogether
*you’ll catch onto the dumbed down language immediately
* or, it’ll just be silly, idle talk
*And, this is a real revealer, there will be cartoonish, ugly illustrations
That’s actually not so hard, is it? But just to throw a wrench in this lovely little list we’ve made, there is an element of subjectivity. In both twaddle and living books. And That. Is. Okay. For instance, some people think Dr. Seuss is utter twaddle and others think he’s stood the test of time in a meaningful way worth noting. You’ll have to make the final call for your home.
All right, now that we have a framework for twaddle and everything we ought to avoid, what is it that we ought to pursue with our children? That would be what we call living books.
And I think you know them when you see them.
These are books that are lively and spark further ideas; they’re imaginative, beautiful, and full of human touch. They delight the mind and the heart. Living books, as Miss Mason said, “have the fit and beautiful expression of inspiring ideas and pictures of life.”
What I love about living books in the homeschool is it has less to do with exact curriculum picks and more to do with the education of the whole person. Living books reach deeply and form a person’s loves, thoughts, and actions. They can change a person. And education is all about forming a person to God, so living books are the foundational element of educating.
If you missed Ep 07 | For King and Country, we discussed the moral and mythic imaginations and how they’re shaped by story. Living books are marked by being narrative in form; they lead with stories through excellent writing. Unlike the classic textbook with its call-out-boxes and bullet points of facts mostly separated from context and ideas, living books aim to show a reader a full-life picture of loving, thinking, and acting.
Miss Mason said it better than I can by asking,
“Why in the world should we not give children, while they are at school, the sort of books they can live upon; books alive with thought and feeling, and delight in knowledge, instead of the miserable cram-books on which they are starved?”
The rich language of living books creates vivid imagery for the mind to play over and over again as the story’s virtue shapes the inner thought life of the reader. Living books compel the reader, whether the child or the parent, to imagine themselves in these situations, to play out the difficulty and struggle of choosing what’s right, and to aim towards growth in imitation of goodness, truth, and beauty.
Children who spend time in living books are children who play living books. They react to what they read by reenacting such stories in their ordinary fun. They turn wooden spoons into knights’ swords, they take blankets and build forts to fight the enemy, they protect the children and beautify their homes and try to imitate. Stories imprint on the soul of a born person; and yes, I mean good or bad stories; they plant seeds that bear fruit or thorns.
This is fundamentally why we moms are so invested in finding the living books and avoiding the twaddle. We know, instinctively, that our kids will be shaped by the stories we read them, and we want to lay before our children an inspiring vision of the truly good life, of the kingdom that was and is and is to come.
It’s not wrong that you care so much about doing this well. And the principles? Just remember they’re supposed to be freeing, not a burden.
Last episode was on what to do with the five and under crowd before formal school begins, and I went back and forth about when to include this next bit. It’s for the moms of younger kids but it revolves around reading. Anyway, I clearly chose to save it until today.
If you haven’t come across it yet, Miss Mason says something rather startling in Parents and Children about reading, even living books, to pre-school age children. She says that they—are you ready for this?—that they should not be read to too often.
Here, I’ll let her say it herself:
"Away with books, and 'reading to'—for the first five or six years of life. The endless succession of story-books, scenes, shifting like a panorama before the child's vision, is a mental and moral dissipation; he gets nothing to grow upon, or is allowed no leisure to digest what he gets."
The first time I read that, I just laughed and kept going.
But it’s bugged me for two years, and it pops into my mind every time I sit down to read another book to my eagerly waiting kids.
What could that Miss Mason be getting at?
Here’s my best guess. In Victorian England, when Miss Mason was working and writing, there was this big explosion of children’s books. They were fashionable and all the rage, and it’s likely that parents were rushing off to buy and read these books to their kids. As for the quality of the books, I can only guess that they were much like some of our contemporary books: popular, on-trend, and ephemeral.
Additionally, Miss Mason believed that the early years of childhood should be marked primarily by natural relationships with many things. Which makes me think her statement isn’t a blockade on reading to little ones but a cautionary remark to parents. It’s better for your child to see and touch and smell and hear, and even taste, the ocean than it is to read many books about the ocean. It’s better to hold a caterpillar and watch it eat a leaf than to read about a very hungry caterpillar. It’s better to have actual knowledge over book knowledge. And this isn’t just a true principle for younger born persons: St. Augustine makes the same point for older learners in his work On Christian Teaching.
So, bring the very best books into your home, just not too many of them, and ensure that your children are primarily learning to relate to God’s world through their senses.
Okay, I want to close the episode with some troubleshooting ideas for living book read-alouds. But first, let me say, I really love hearing from CP listeners. I enjoy the questions, additions, and comments in my DMs and emails—so thank you for joining into this conversation with me. One such podcast friend is Brooke, who shared with me her new homeschooling tagline which she made after Ep 07. “Students fit for the country that is to come.” Isn’t that great? Anyway, she also asked what exactly my younger kids do during a read aloud, specifically my sons and I thought it would be a helpful thing to share as you embark on reading living books.
First troubleshooting tip, allow movement. Lose the idea that your children will sit quietly, listening to you read or will stay put on a blanket under a tree without breaking a tea cup while you recite poetry. I mean, sometimes things work that well, but with little ones under five, I can attest that my read-alouds do not look like that most days. Not only do little kids learn and process through movement, but it’s also not developmentally appropriate or loving to expect very tiny children to sit for very long. Of course there’s a difference between building legos and dragging the baby across the floor at top speed. It’s an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing.
Second, have a snack. I may or may choose snacks that come in tiny pieces so that it takes a bit for my younger two to get through it. Think pretzels, apples and peanut butter, raisins, a plate of crackers, cheese, and fruit; and so on. But really, what’s more exciting than a delicious afternoon snack and a great story?
Third, lay out read-aloud-friendly toys. My middle guy is a major tinkerer; his hands have to be engaged in something in order for him to sit and pay attention. I lay out an invitation to play before I start reading by simply pulling out the legos, magna tiles, puzzles, or screwdriver set. I don’t force him to do them and I don’t ask him to get them, I just leave them out and he’ll wander over there. If any of you have a two or three-year-old, then you know choosing to do it is half of the fun for them.
Lastly, make sure your read-aloud time is alternated with mental rest. If you do some sort of morning time or benediction table, it wouldn’t be wise to tack on a read-aloud time to the end of that. Your children have already labored to keep their minds attuned to you and their work; Miss Mason would say it’s time to give their minds rest. Let them go play, work on a project, or something unlike what they’ve just done. After the mind rests, it’ll be ready to delight in mental work again. That’s when you do your read-aloud.
So there we have it: a primer on twaddle and living books.
As I head out, I want to share a final illustration with you. While I used the movie version of Alice in Wonderland in the intro, the book is now considered a classic. But Miss Mason referred to the book as a delicious feast of absurdities. Which, I don’t think means a living book. So what we call a classic, Miss Mason called absurd.
Let that be your final reminder that there is a level of subjectivity to this twaddle business, that being an old book is not a guarantee of being a good book and neither is being a new book a guarantee of being a bad book. We want to offer our children inspiring ideas that spark a flame of curiosity, imagination, and allegiance to the better things. Find the stories that pull on the hearts and minds of every person in your home. There is one great, living Story that will echo through our frames for all eternity but, for now, we can offer the stories that shape the contours of our children towards all that is good, true, and beautiful.
I’ll see you guys in two weeks.
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Ah, I do love when you listen to the end. Two things for you: first, I’ve made an additional resource for today’s episode. If you’re A Commonplace Note subscriber, then you already received the video in today’s newsletter. (If you’d like to become a subscriber to get first dibs on things like this, you can join us at thecommonplacepodcast.com/newsletter.) But if you aren’t, don’t worry, you can still watch me walk through a few books from my kids’ shelves to show you how I distinguish between a living book and twaddle. I hope it also shows you that while this podcast explores the ideals of classical education, what’s truly best for children, I am a common mom who, yes, found some twaddle on my shelves. I am no ideal. You can find the link to the video in today’s episode notes. Second, if you have a few seconds and enjoy The Commonplace, will you please pop over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review? It’s a simple way to help connect new homeschool moms with The Commonplace and the beauty of classical education.
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