The Berenstain Bears' Bedtime Battle: Finally, a Berenstain Bears Book Written for Me. That's the Problem.

In order to get my kids upstairs, finally, to start getting ready for bed, we'll turn it into a game, a "chase me up the stairs" kind of game where either I chase them or they chase me. From my perspective it's clearly just a really fast way to get them upstairs, but for them, it's a game. And then eventually it becomes a routine that we do every single night, and if we don't do it, they'll remember, and we'll have to go back downstairs and actually do it again. So when Papa Bear tried to turn cleaning up the toys into a "let's see how fast we can pick up toys" contest, I knew exactly what he was doing. I also think it's pretty funny how it falls pretty flat. The cubs just really don't buy into it, and then he's just stuck there having cleaned up all the toys himself for the most part, exhausted.

Going in, I figured this would be about the bears struggling a lot during bedtime and then some resolution after the fact. Mama and Papa work through some routine that works a lot better for them, the kids buy into it, and bedtime becomes a lot easier. That's not at all what we get here. We get essentially just a snapshot into the bears' daily life as Mama and Papa experience bedtime like any parent who's ever done bedtime with kids before. The kids fighting it, the parents trying a lot of different strategies to make it go faster, some of them working, some of them not, and then ultimately the parents just falling asleep before the cubs do.

The Opening Rhyme

It's a decent rhyme, but very defeatist. Parents don't have to lose this battle!

Papa announces it's eight o'clock, and Brother protests because he's just getting his Jurassic dinosaurs lined up to fight his Cretaceous dinosaurs. Sister's stuffed animals are all set up for a tea party. Mama won't let anyone upstairs until the toys are picked up, which the cubs do ever so slowly. Then it's the piggyback ride up the stairs, the bath, the bubble bath disaster, the toothpaste argument, prayers, and finally a negotiation over which bedtime story gets read. There's clearly initial conflict, which is that the cubs are struggling to go to bed on time, but really we're just zoomed in on the bears' life for the hour that is bedtime. There's no resolution, unless you want to call Mama and Papa falling asleep mid-story, with both cubs deciding to let them sleep because "they need their rest" and then lying in bed on their own, reading, not even asleep yet, a resolution. I think it's more just the reality.

The Title Page

Mama and Papa are looking particularly angry here and what is that, naked Bears? (gasp)

My kids definitely get enjoyment out of all the naughty games the cubs play before bed. I think they see themselves in it quite a bit, not wanting to quit playing, having to clean up their toys, and then moving really slowly because they want a prolonged bedtime. The bath part would go a little differently in our house though. My kids would complain a lot about wanting to get into the bath, but then once they were finally in, they would complain a lot about never wanting to get out. And the constant asking for more things is dead on. First the cubs want to say their prayers, then they want a story, then they want different stories. The one thing my kids would also ask for somewhere in here is a night snack, right after they brush their teeth, probably. That's how it always goes. Let's brush our teeth. Oh, and by the way, I want a night snack. Which sometimes we give in for, and that means you just have to brush your teeth a second time, unfortunately.

Papa doesn't look particularly motivated to get the kids to clean up their toys. Every parent recognizes this battle between wanting to move quickly and getting kids to do things themselves.

Papa at his most aloof

We get Papa Bear at his most aloof throughout the whole book. For the most part he's almost as much of a problem as the cubs when it comes to the bedtime routine. He's the one giving them the piggyback ride up the stairs that they ask for. He's the one who adds a cupful of bubble bath rather than a capful, making a huge mess, with Mama gently calling him out that if he'd just read the bottle more carefully it says capful. Then in the process of dealing with the bubbles he slips and falls on the pink goo, one thing after another.

It's like this book was written on my life. Papa Bear is me, giving two children piggyback rides up the stairs, who are much too big for it.

Then all of a sudden he's angry about the cubs complaining about the color of the toothpaste, squeezing the tube as hard as he can until a big white snake shoots out, probably making a bigger mess that he has to clean up. Is Papa maybe a little too much of a bumbling fool here? Probably. They're leaning into it pretty heavily. That's something we see in some of these later books, where Papa becomes almost a character of himself, and then every once in a while they'll do a role reversal where Papa is the Mama Bear and Mama is the Papa Bear, probably because they were aware of the bumbling fool Papa trope by this point. That's not what we get here. We get Papa acting a fool for the most part, and ultimately he probably causes as much damage trying to get the cubs into bed as he does good trying to move them forward.

Papa Bear, losing his focus to get the Bears in bed for a bit and just being a kid himself. Again, it's like this book is based on my life.

You're on your own for the lesson

When it comes to the moral of the story, I don't think we're really getting one. There's no solution presented for the bedtime battle. You can have a conversation with your kids about it, pointing out where the cubs could be doing a lot better about getting to bed sooner by cleaning up their toys when they're asked, but the book itself isn't providing that. It would be up to the parent to parse it out themselves and decide which lessons to bring down to their kids. And that makes it a little harder to find an opportunity to pull this one off the shelf. Let's say bedtime is a struggle in your family. If you pulled out this book, I don't think the kids come away thinking "oh, I'm not doing things the right way, this is how I should do it." If anything it kind of reinforces their behavior, because hey, the cubs are doing it and there are no punishments, really. The parent would have to use their own discretion and say, this is a good example of a poor bedtime routine, here's where the cubs could have done better, and maybe, for the kids' benefit, call out how the parents could be doing better too, with more structure, or in Papa's case, a lot fewer mistakes along the way.

The pictures don't give a kid much to hold onto

Illustration-wise, it doesn't stand out a whole lot. We get exasperated looks from both Mama and Papa as they trade off who the exasperated one is, and a lot of tired moments as they work together as a team to make bedtime go faster, the teamwork not always being the best, Papa not necessarily upholding his end quite as well. There's a playfulness there too, particularly with Papa, who oscillates between a really grouchy face as he's trying to get the cubs to do something and a more playful, gets-sucked-into-a-kid's-world, popping-bubbles type of face. But there are noticeably fewer illustrations here than in a lot of other Berenstain Bears books. Most of the books have pages with a lot of different images spread throughout, almost like a lineage of the story progressing across the page. Here we're generally just getting a single spread, or maybe two images across a spread. Which is okay in this instance, because there's really not a lot going on with the plot, so there's a little less to show. But for the big images we do get, there's not an extreme amount of detail outside of a few good facial expressions along the way.

I'm with Brother Bear on this one, "The Three Little Kittens" looks like an absolute bore.

The illustrations do a good job supporting the story, but there's nothing a kid is going to want to spend a ton of time staring at, and nothing that's going to get imprinted in their mind.

Written for the parents

This book almost feels as if it's written for the parents more than the kids, and that's where it becomes the most interesting: purely from the parent's perspective, me reading this and seeing my own life through the bears' experience. It's a very accurate book when it comes to the bedtime routine, the constant struggle to get kids through all the various steps you need to get them through in order to get to bed. The cubs aren't extremely obstinate, they're just really slow moving, always bringing up some additional thing, wanting to bargain. And you get a little disagreement between Mama and Papa about the different things that need to happen before bed, where Mama wants them to be responsible about picking up their stuff and Papa just wants to get them up to bed, and ultimately the cubs aren't really held responsible for the cleaning anyway. Papa does most of the work.

I'd say this book for me is probably just a two out of five. I was tempted to give this one three stars, but ultimately Berenstain Bears books are written for kids, not adults. From a kid's perspective it's just not that interesting of a book. They might laugh a little along the way at Brother and Sister prolonging bed, but nothing happens that's of high interest to a kid, and there's no moral for them to walk away with. They're not learning that going slow during bedtime is bad. The best aspect of the book is the parent's-eye realism, and I'm not the target audience. I'm not pulling out Berenstain Bears books to read on my own. Well, actually, maybe I do. That's what I did just now, I suppose. So maybe I'm the one-in-a-million adult who will do that. But for the most part these are children's books, they should be designed for children first, and I don't think this one is.