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The Curious Self-Pity and Resentment Behind ‘Go the F**k to Sleep’

Katie Roiphe, on the unusual cultural phenomenon of Go the Fuck to Sleep – the new “children’s picture book for adults” by Adam Mansbach:

The odd, rageful, beautiful little book’s inspiration lies in the commingling of insipid bedtime story rhymes with the inner monologue of the wildly irritated parent: “The owls fly forth from the treetops./ Through the air, they soar and they sweep./ A hot crimson rage fills my heart, love. / For real, shut the fuck up and sleep.” The stylish parody relies for its humor and frisson on a certain level of frustration, an over- the- top, pent-up fury toward one’s children, because without that fury, it’s simply not that funny. […]

Here of course, that anger or hostility is aimed at children, at big-eyed toddlers padding around in their strawberry pajamas, and that is what is both exhilarating and disturbing about the book. There is a nastiness in Go the Fuck to Sleep, an undercurrent of resentment that is comic, or “cathartic,” as another Amazon reviewer put it, only to parents who are pretty radically subjugating themselves to a certain kind of kid-centered drabness, and judging from the book’s runaway success, that would be a lot of parents. […]

One wonders if this hostility toward the child, who is naturally and rightfully manipulative, is just a tiny bit misplaced. If we are raising a generation that sees the whole world as an expanse of devoted maids and butlers, if we ourselves are overly beholden or enslaved to our children’s anxieties and desires, isn’t it our own fault? Likewise, if we can’t manage to hire a baby sitter and get out of the house, if we have made of the conventional nuclear family structure something stifling, airless, it can’t really be the fault of a 4-year-old, resourceful and mischievous as he may be. We are, after all, to blame for our own self-sacrifice, and if we are being honest and precise, it’s not exactly self-sacrifice, tinged as it is with vanity, with pride in our good behavior, with a certain showiness in our parenting, with self-congratulation.

Whether it’s in the service of cathartic relief or something else, Go the Fuck to Sleep seems to demonstrate an almost violent antipathy toward children – and an ‘Othering’ of them that seems to claim they are far removed from the human (implicitly, ‘adult’) experience. As much as the book might act as a token of a solidarity in modern parents’ collective tribulations of dealing with children, this empathy with parents comes at the direct expense of empathy with children and their experiences. As Ben Delaney tweets, Go the Fuck to Sleep almost seems to be “a strange celebration of our culture’s lack of empathy toward kids.”

Roiphe does begin to unravel the roots of this antipathy in her article, when she begins to examine the dogged, often self-sacrificing efforts across a particular segment of society and parents – well, she rather unflatteringly calls them “yuppie parents” – to be ‘child-centered’ in our actions and parenting. Go the Fuck to Sleep is simply the point where it all erupts, the point of backlash where the cultural burden to be the ‘perfect parent’, with all the “enlightened, engaged, sensitive parenting practices” that go along with the role, as Roiphe elaborates, causes them to go unhinged and unleash all the built-up repressed rage.

What we don’t regularly realize is that in focusing so intently on (what we presume are) children’s particular needs and characteristics, we’re ultimately doing them harm by moving them farther and farther from the center of our society – from the society they exist in both currently and as future members of society. A separate, conceptual ‘Land of Childhood’, one which inevitably emerges alongside the increased societal expectations and burdens of ‘Parenthood’ and good parenting practice, serves no one – not least of whom the parents themselves. But it’s vital to know that becoming a parent does not mean your life is now a forsaken one, a now desolate bond of servitude toward your child. Nor, indeed, does the arrival of kids in your life mean that your child might not appreciate and wish to participate in aspects of the life you had before, or that the world of children is ultimately incompatible with the world of adults. Mansbach’s book may portray the life of a parent as one of “Sartre-like bleakness and claustraphobia” – but it need not be that way. I propose that by embracing children themselves, by listening and empathizing with their experiences, and embracing them in the folds of all of life – and ultimately society at its whole, not just relegating them to the far-removed ‘Land of Childhood’ – children can be the greatest joy of all in life.