And the doorbell rang... and rang... and rang...

Reading books makes kids smarter, and when parents read to their children it can have other benefits.

The books we read as children stay with us for life. Those simple morality tales we hear as bedtime stories can shape out biases and prejudices through the rest of our lives.

Looking ahead the the future, what kind of stories should we be telling our kids, to give them the moral foundation to understand the world?

Let's look at two examples, one good and one bad, to see how we might be setting up our kids with preconceived notions that could stay with them for life. Both stories are about sharing cookies...

Pat Hutchins might be better known as the presenter of the British TV show "Rosie and Jim", but she was also a prolific writer of children's stories.

My favorite of her stories is a book published in 1986 called "The Doorbell Rang".
In the story, Mother has just baked 12 cookies, and the two children have to share the snacks between them. That's 6 each! Quite a feast.

The doorbell rings, and some of their friends come over. Now they have to share 12 cookies between 6 children. They are down to just 2 cookies each...

Soon enough the doorbell rings again, and 6 more friends come over. The children look pretty glum. Sharing their snacks has left them with only one cookie. When the doorbell rings again, no one wants to get up and answer it. The idea of breaking their cookies up in to smaller chunks, or leaving the newcomers without makes everyone sad.

But guess what? It's only Grandma, with more cookies!

I think you can get the moral of this tale. If the kids hadn't opened the door, they would all be poorer. Newcomers can bring more than hungry mouths and locking the door against the outside world is no way to live.

We can also think about the fact that the kids are sharing a common good. Mum's cookies are not something that they have any right to own. We may be reluctant to share the fruits of our labor, but to what extent are those goods exclusively a result of our hard work?

In an era where it's easy to represent the economy in terms of shared cookies, this book really resonates.

It's a great way to help your kids understand the value of fair shares without having to first educate them about the horrors of the global finance pyramid scheme.

This book is also great in classrooms. You can use it for teaching math to young children in a way that makes it easy to understand the concept of division in to whole numbers.

The second book I'd like to talk about was published the year before the other one, in 1985. Written by written by Laura Numeroff and illustrated by Felicia Bond, "If you give a mouse a cookie" is a popular book all over the world, but especially the USA and boasts an impressive list of supporters, from Oprah Winfrey to Laura Bush.

But in my opinion, this tale is all that is wrong with the discourse on welfare and inequality.

Admittedly, it is an obvious critique of the welfare state. If you give a mouse a cookie, then he will want a glass of milk:

He then requests a straw (to drink the milk), a mirror (to avoid a milk mustache), nail scissors (to trim his hair in the mirror), and a broom (to sweep up his hair trimmings). Next he wants to take a nap, have a story read to him, draw a picture, and hang the drawing on the refrigerator. Looking at the refrigerator makes him thirsty, so the mouse asks for a glass of milk. The circle is complete when he wants a cookie to go with it. 

It is supposed to be an illustration of the welfare trap, whereby when people are given something and don't have to work for it, they become lazy and demand more.  I can agree this far; that being on welfare long term is a terrible thing, and the most desirable situation is that all citizens should be able to support themselves without having to resort to means tested income from the government.

Like the other book, it is often used in schools and there are lots of activities to go with it.

As well as numerous spinoffs which tell the same story, with a different creature.

And the inevitable parody.

"If you give a mouse..." is incredibly well known and well loved by conservatives. It was recently adapted for television (well, Amazon).

But what lesson does it really teach kids?
First, to my mind the story dehumanizes welfare recipients. They aren't people, but rodents. You can't imagine a mouse having any problem going out and working for food. The idea of a mouse being intentionally kept unemployed or being subjected to wage suppression so that they have no choice but to rely on welfare would never even enter the head of most readers.
Why can't the mouse just go and find some cheese and stop being so damned lazy?

Secondly, it makes it seem as being on welfare is something that people would desire. That's its a kind of luxury communism. Believe me, anyone who's ever been on welfare would rather be working. But the system whereby you must not work in order to qualify for welfare, and it's nearly impossible to afford things like healthcare without state assistance, pushes people in to welfare dependency.

It's the very moralizing of the well-off which prevents welfare from being a springboard to a better life, and turns it in to a mouse trap.

It also paints welfare as "charity" instead of what it really is, social insurance. A shared fund which is supposed to act as a safety net for the rare times that we find ourselves in trouble. We paid taxes to receive this service. It's not free charity handed down out by our gracious betters. If some people are kept in never ending poverty, so that they never get the chance to pay in to the fund, that's hardly their fault and they can't be accused of not wanting to earn more.

Also, think about who baked the cookie that the boy gives to the mouse. By what right does the boy decide who gets to eat that cookie?

I could go on and on in this vein, listing the ways that the book takes a complex issue and turns it in to a fairy tale for easy digestion by young conservatives. But it's enough I think to say that I will never be reading that book to my kids or any of my students.

As we move in to the future, it's possible that mass automation and things like Universal Basic Income will change the whole narrative on this issue. I don't think it will be helpful for people's opinions to be built on a weak foundation like this.

What do you think? Is there any book that you read as a child which would help to instill the kind of values that you think will mold our descendants to be the kind of people who are ready to become the new stewards of our world?

Are there any books which you would warn your kids away from reading?