There are certain things I would never tell a child. In this fast world their innocence is already robbed from them too early in life. Why tell them everything right away?

I was looking through the books on the shelves in Books Of Wonder, one of the best children book stores in the city, located on 18 West 18th Street. (The store is amazing! If I was a child, that store would be my favorite place on earth. I am not even a child and I enjoyed it! It had every child book you could think of and the staff were a great bunch of people.) I felt as if I was back in my childhood days for a while. I kept having flashbacks of elementary school and how much of a joy it was to get lost in a storybook as a little girl. Then, all of sudden and I came across Mummy Never Told Me by Babette Cole and I snapped out of it. I could not believe what I was seeing and reading in this “children” book. The illustrations are kiddy but the material is far from it.

I should have known that it was going to be a controversial book by its title but I thought, how controversial can it get?! It’s a children book! But Babette Cole did not bite her tongue in letting children know where they came from, why girls and boys are made the way they are, what goes on in a parents room at night, why some men like other men and more hard-to-talk-about- subjects. The book open up subjects to children that are not supposed to be opened up. It is a reason why children don’t know as much as adults. It’s to keep them children.

If a child is asking ‘challenging’ questions, the wise thing to do is to tell them that they are not ready for the answer instead of giving them a book that will confuse them.