A New Children‘s Book Teaches Parents How to Talk to Their Kids About the World We Live in Today
Two years ago, children’s book author Oliver Jeffers brought his newborn son home from the hospital and found himself pointing out the most mundane of objects—things he never really cared to notice in the past—to the days-old baby in his arms. “It started with me giving him a brief tour of our apartment and realizing the comedy in that,” he says over the phone from his Brooklyn studio. “I was pointing out the difference between daytime and nighttime. Explaining, ‘This is a chair; this is food.’”
Jeffers, the celebrated talent behind massively popular books like The Day the Crayons Quit, admits this newfound sense of perspective—“You start looking at the very, very micro and the very, very macro,” he says—was the initial spark of inspiration behind his latest book, Here We Are: Notes for Living on Planet Earth. “I had the realization that it’s going to be up to me (and his mother and his grandparents) to teach him all the things that he needs to know to be a functioning member of society,” he explains. “There’s an incredible amount of responsibility in that.”
A few months into Jeffers’s newfound parenthood, he was suddenly exposed to what he describes as some “weird political times.” Like many parents around the country, Jeffers was struggling with how he would eventually explain the bizarre presidential election cycle, filled with antagonism and unkindness, to his son. And like many concerned citizens, Jeffers, who had always enjoyed a large social presence online yet never felt like it was his place to comment on politics, started to feel an overwhelming urge to speak up. “I tried to only comment on something if there was a degree of positivity to it rather than just adding to the noise and the frustration and anger,” he explains.
When he wasn’t sharing posts on Facebook, Jeffers was busy helping friend and former Capitol Hill staffer Erin Allweiss with a campaign called Love Letter America, whose goal was to remind political representatives to focus on talking about what they love about this country, and not just what they want to fix or change. He eventually realized he wanted to incorporate this tilt toward a more positive outlook into his new book, too. “Things were changing and becoming quite aggressive and insular at a very accelerated and alarming rate,” he says. “Maybe I’m feeling those things more so because of being a parent, but it was a combination of both of those things that went into putting this book together.”
But don’t worry, Here We Are isn’t a children’s story that analyzes our current political state. The book is simply an introduction (or for adults, a reintroduction) to the planet we all live on—Republicans and Democrats, Trumpers and Never-Trumpers, Americans and foreigners. Here We Are explains our world in the most basic of terms: our place in space, Earth’s terrain, the shapes and colors of different animals. “The things that we think matter—what shoes am I going to wear to the party, what does so-and-so think of me—are actually so irrelevant in the greater scheme of things,” Jeffers says. “Whenever you spell out these very basic principles of humanity, a dose of perspective is forced upon you—you get the astronomical overview effect.”
For those unfamiliar with the term, the overview effect is a unique phenomenon that happens to astronauts when they first see Earth from a spaceship millions of miles away. The experience has been described as a “cognitive shift in awareness”or a feeling of overwhelming oneness. “When astronauts go into space, the first day they are each pointing out their home cities,” Jeffers explains. “Then they are pointing out one another’s countries, and then suddenly they are just pointing out Earth. That huge mass—that’s home.”
That sense of unity is ultimately what Jeffers is trying to remind all of us in Here We Are. “It can be quite a dangerous thing when people stop listening,” Jeffers says of these polarizing times. Perhaps the key to fixing the divisiveness is to speak to those people who still know how to listen: our children.
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