Raising Kids is F-ing Hard

And you don’t have to take my word for it.

Witness the best-seller status of Adam Mansbach’s “picture book” Go the F--k to Sleep and the overnight viral status of the Samuel L. Jackson reading of the book on Audible.com.

Unless you’ve been on a digital diet this past week, you’ve heard about Mansbach’s book, which looks like a bedtime book for a toddler and sounds like a bedtime book for a toddler… except for the parent-narrator’s increasingly aggravated and profane asides as his child resists all attempts to put her to sleep. Mansbach was featured on NPR  and the Jackson reading seems to be everywhere.  Why?

Because Mansbach has put a voice to a normal condition of parenthood: frustration. Being a parent means dealing with an irrational, self-centered and totally charming person whose sense of priorities is completely out of whack. Toddlers don’t care that you’re tired. They don’t care that you’ve had a hard day. They are oblivious to your hopes for enjoying just some microwaved popcorn and a DVD with your partner. And all the sweet prose and pretty illustrations in the world won’t make a child sleepy if she’s just not.

Mansbach’s book does an excellent job of mimicking the saccharine rhymes of the typical bedtime book, even as the façade slips and the narrator’s annoyance rises. Ricardo Cortes’s illustrations mock the form by mixing kid’s book idealized natural settings with realistic family portrayals. The message seems to be that the real life of families is not so simple as the manuals make it. The real life of families is a lot more challenging. Sometimes every good parent feels pushed to the edge.

Mansbach’s narrator wails at one point, “My life is a failure. I’m a shitty-ass parent,” and we know how that feels. We’ve all been there, brought to our knees by a child who doesn’t even reach our knees.

Mansbach’s book lets us know that we’re not alone. If every parent feels this way sometimes, then there’s hope for us and our family. While this is definitely not a book to read to a child, it is a book to read to yourself, after the kids are in bed.