The Berenstain Bears Count Their Blessings: All Lesson, No Story, and One Very Convenient Storm

Out of our 40-plus book Berenstain Bears collection, this is probably one of the very least read books we own. And that's not to say it's the worst. It's definitely not the worst (keep your eyes out for one of those). Even the worst ones have something about them that causes a kid to pull them off the shelf, or some specific lesson they tell that no other book tells. This one tells a similar lesson to two better books in our collection, and tells it the worst of the three, so it just doesn't come out very much. Outside of the fact that I might see it, realize I haven't read it in forever, and pull it off for that very reason.

The Opening Rhyme

Get big eyes when they take off and roam? This is a stretch...

The setup: Sister goes off to Lizzy's house, and Lizzy has the biggest collection of Bearbie dolls ever. Brother goes off to Cousin Fred's, and Fred has a huge pile of video games for his GameBear player. Back at the treehouse, Mama already knows exactly what's going to happen when they get home, and she's not wrong.

There's not really a story here

Mama is really the main character of this book. The cubs are not even present in a lot of the scenes, while Mama is just having a conversation in her head about how she's going to have to deal with the cubs coming home and talking about all the stuff the others have that they don't have, and how she's going to have to talk them out of it and, as the title says, teach them to count their blessings.

Mama Bear judging the other Bear Country parents.

The cubs come home, and of course, as Mama predicted, they start right in. Lizzy just got an equestrian Bearbie. Fred's got three new video games, three. And right as that happens, a big storm hits, which becomes the vessel for teaching the count-their-blessings lesson. Brother and Sister are a little afraid, and Mama starts counting: they have a roof over their heads to protect them, they have each other, they have a Mama and Papa who love them, and when the lights go out they get hot cocoa over the fire.

Through the course of the storm raging we also get a little side lesson about what lightning and thunder actually are, counting the seconds between the flash and the boom, about a thousand feet for every second you count, which takes up maybe a quarter of the book. It's not that it isn't interesting to a kid. I think kids would be interested to learn that light travels faster than sound, or why the sound even happens from air rushing into the burnt-up space. It's just very unnecessary for the book itself. It's almost like they threw it in there to fill up an extra page, or to try to win back some kid they were losing because the story is too bland. And that's not a typical Berenstain Bears thing, at least in the heyday. Those books aren't simplistic. They have complex plots and different storylines going at once, but they don't usually have wasted space, which this really feels like.

The Title Page

Foreshadowing what will happen later. Basically a bunch of outside portraits of the Treehouse during the storm.

It's hard not to compare this one to The Berenstain Bears Get the Gimmies, because they are very similar books, and you see totally different approaches to the storytelling. In the Gimmies, the bears have this problem and it gets progressively worse. Mama and Papa try some things that don't work, and eventually, with the help of Gramps and Gran, they come up with a plan the cubs actually buy into. In Count Their Blessings we're not given that. The cubs come home complaining, as expected, and then a convenient storm comes in that somehow just magically teaches them the lesson. It's hard to buy into from an adult's perspective, because I can put myself in Mama and Papa's shoes here, and it's just not as simple as that. A storm is not going to make Sister Bear want fewer Bearbies. Nothing is going to make her want fewer Bearbie dolls. The want is going to be what it is. The real lesson is more of an understanding that other families are going to be different, this is the way our family works, and you still have a lot of stuff that's great to play with.

Then the book closes with Mama and Papa having a little conversation about maybe getting the kids those toys eventually, a just married Bearbie for Sister and a couple of video games for Brother. And you have to wonder who that's for. Part of me wants to say it's a bone to throw to the kids listening, like, hey, the cubs didn't get what they wanted, but birthdays and Christmas are around the corner. I don't really like that ending. It almost invalidates the counting-the-blessings from earlier, where it's like, oh, and by the way, they actually will just get what they want.

On kid engagement, I honestly can't think of a Berenstain Bears book with a lower engagement level. The cubs don't play a central enough role; they're missing from the first half while Mama worries, and during the lesson portion they're just sitting there nervous about the storm, listening to a lecture about counting their blessings. Kids don't want to be preached to by a book. They want a story first and foremost, with the lesson embedded in that story, and that's just not the case here. The only thing that might keep a kid's interest is actually the wasted pages about the science of the storm. If my son has ever asked a question about this book, and I honestly can't remember one, it would have been a question about thunder and lightning. Maybe they should have renamed it The Berenstain Bears Teach Their Kids About Thunder and Lightning.

The moral is good, the tools aren't there

The moral of the story itself is good. It's actually a really big one for kids, and a really difficult one for parents to deal with. Out and about, I'm always trying not to judge other parents for doing too much spoiling of their kids. Every time I see an e-bike drive up and down my street I think that, then get a little angry inside, but every parent's going to be different and that's just life.

There's also a money conversation buried in here somewhere, which is a tricky one with kids. You don't want to just outright say, sorry kids, we can't get all those toys, mommy and daddy are poor. But you also don't want to shy away from the fact that money exists, because kids are always going to be aware of the differences: so-and-so drives a different car, so-and-so has different looking clothes, and eventually there's going to be a sense of who's rich and who's poor. The useful version of this lesson is that yes, there is a spectrum of wealth, but that's not the same as a spectrum of happiness. A kid is always going to deal with envy. Adults deal with envy. This just isn't the book that's going to help them deal with those feelings, even if the moral itself is a good one to talk about. There are better books out there that are more relatable and don't have some magical storm come through washing the feelings away.

Full pages, not much to stare at

Illustration-wise, this is also on the lower end of the spectrum compared to a lot of the other Berenstain Bears books. Not as many unique facial expressions. We mostly get a concerned Mama, and for me it almost misses the mark. She's going beyond concerned into outright mad, which maybe is what they were going for, but it doesn't seem quite fitting. The cubs are mostly just there, doing their standard bear faces.

The most we get is probably the pictures inside Brother and Sister's heads of the different toys they want. We get an idea of what some of the video games look like on Brother's GameBear, and what some of the Bearbie dolls look like, which are kind of interesting.

Those GameBear games look pretty lame...

It's not lazy, either. There's definitely effort put into each of the images. Every single page is full to the brim with full spreads, a lot of them with multiple bubbles in them. There's just a lot more filler, which is nicely done but not interesting. A lot of it is outside shots with rain coming down, some without a single bear in them. Nice landscape scenes, but nothing a kid is going to stare at for more than five seconds.

We get a lot of scenes of the Treehouse here.

Even once the storm gets going and the big thunderclaps hit, the cubs' scared faces aren't particularly convincing.

The best this book has to offer for a Dad voice performance is a loud KABOOM that sends bedtime back by at least 5 minutes.

I'll bump the illustrations up to a three from a two just because we do get the video game and Bearbie doll thought bubbles. Otherwise there's not a lot here that stands out in a way that's particularly appealing.

Why it stays on the shelf

This is the second Berenstain Bears book we've covered on a pretty similar moral topic of wanting things. The Gimmies is the cubs wanting everything they see; this one is tilted more towards jealousy or envy over what somebody else has, so it's still a case of the gimmies, just a particular case based on what somebody else got. And there's a third one we haven't reviewed yet, The Green-Eyed Monster, which is also really good and is coming. I can understand why Stan and Jan ended up making multiple books on this topic, because it's a very common problem for kids to have. But when you're in third place on a very similar topic, you just don't come out that much. The kids aren't pulling it out, and I'm probably not pulling it out either.

Dad survivability isn't great here either. The book isn't painful to read. It's one where I could probably turn off half my brain and think about something else while I read it, because there's not a lot of performance to put into it, not even a lot of Mama and Papa or the cubs talking, really. But that's not fun. Reading to your kids at night should be fun, and this one is just going through the motions.