Mythical wife and I are raising our daughters with some fairly simple rules, one of which being no screen time until the age of 2, in which we will introduce small amounts of screen time of quality kid-friendly content with at least some educational value, and work our way up from there, so they don’t become lifeless couch potatoes by the time they’re age five. Maybe that’ll happen when they’re seven instead, but hey if we can bilk out two years of life where they’re not parked in front of a screen, then all the better for us.
That being said, we’ve accumulated a lot of books over the last year and change, as books and reading have been among the primary forms of entertainment and storytelling to our first, and will be for our second. Among the things that brings pride and happiness to me is seeing my first hustle over to her bookshelf, pick out a book, rush back, hand it to me, and then plop into my lap to enjoy some story time with dada, and her appreciation and enjoyment in books is already being established.
However, of all the books that we’ve amassed so far, few make me scrunch my eyebrow and hope that my daughter doesn’t pick it and bring it back, than the books mythical wife picked out by none other than quote-unquote “comedian,” Jimmy Fallon. Everything is Mama and Your Baby’s First Word Will Be Dada, specifically, because I for one won’t go out of my way to pick either myself.
Why? Because they’re both complete and utter bullshit. Spoiler alert, both books are basically 15 pages of either “MAMA” or “DADA” over and over again, with literally nothing other than single contrast words and some singular illustrations. I’m not saying my children should already be capable of reading The DaVinci Code or anything, but even infants and newborns deserve better than this horse shit.
Let’s be real here, if not for the simple fact that these books are “authored” by, and has the name of Jimmy Fallon slapped onto these things, these shit books would probably rank lower than the bible at being usable for toilet paper. It truly is a case of how nice it must be to be a celebrity, because an unfunny hack like Jimmy Fallon can literally produce a bullshit no effort stack of cardstock paper, put his name on it, and it will make it onto bookshelves, and I bet if I took two seconds to look it up, these were probably New York Times bestsellers at some point in history, but I’m not going to because I’d rather spend 52 seconds typing this sentence up instead. He’s probably made more than what I make in a year in salary, on the royalties of this fucking snooze job of children’s literature, which only further feed the angsty narrative of how unfair the world is.
The takeaway of this post is that if any new or impending parents ever read this, do yourselves and your children a favor and stay the fuck away from Jimmy Fallon’s shitty books, especially if you actually love your kids and want their brains to actually develop. Might I recommend authors such as Anna Dewdney or Sandra Boynton instead as opposed to the guy who could barely keep it together on SNL and often times failed, to not laugh at his own unfunny shit jokes?