Oopsie-Do! By Tim Kubart. Pictures by Lori Richmond. Harper.
$17.99.
Even in well-meaning, well-written,
well-illustrated kids’ books, it is possible to have too much of a good thing.
And that is what readers ages 4-8, and their families, get from Tim Kubart and
Lori Richmond in Oopsie-Do! The idea
here is to use Kubart’s fame as a Grammy award winner, and an original song
that is available online, to expand upon and reinforce the message of a book
that tells young children not to be upset about mistakes – just take them in
stride, and all the people around you, kids and adults alike, will come
together to fix things.
It certainly makes sense to present and
reinforce the notion that everybody makes mistakes and that accidents, when
they happen, are no big deal. And there are some very good books for this age
range that make the point quite well, one recent one, for example, being Andrea Tsurumi’s Accident!
The secret ingredient in that book, and in effective communication about
accidents and their consequences or non-consequences, is humor, not repetition
– although repetition can certainly play a role. But where Tsurumi’s book piles
absurdity on absurdity as it has “awful” thing after “awful” thing occur for an
ever-growing cast of characters, the Kubart/Richmond book has all the accidents
– a whole string of them – happen to one single little girl. And while her
friends, as shown immediately on the book’s cover, have expressions of concern
about the messes that the mistakes cause, the girl herself is seen smiling, her
arms thrown wide as if to shrug off the situation as no big deal at all.
This is fine – up to a point. But the point is made again and again and
again in Oopsie-Do! And the response
to errors is overly simplistic, even for this age group: “No reason to fret if
you make a mistake! Just say OOPSIE-DO!”
Well, yes, if you make a
mistake. But in this book, the girl spills fish food when caring for the class
aquarium; accidentally dumps her entire snack on the floor when getting her
backpack; mixes colors with which she is painting in a way she does not want;
falls when kicking a ball; mis-buttons her coat when heading home; and squirts
toothpaste onto her pajama top at night. There are mistakes by her little
brother and the family dog, too. Kubart and Richmond do not, however, use the
pileup of small problems in any humorous way – all readers get is the
admonition, again and again and again, to say the magic “oopsie-do!” so
everything is all right. Sometimes things are all right because classmates help
clean up the spilled fish food, sometimes because the teacher finds a snack
replacement, sometimes because the messed-up colors become the basis of a whole
new approach to painting – but it is a very messy one that does not earn an “oopsie-do!” even when the
girl splatters paint on her face and all over the floor. And sometimes, as with
the toothpaste incident, things are all right “just because”: the girl changes
her pajama top and leaves the one with toothpaste on it on the floor, along
with the toothpaste tube and everything coming out of it. Parents will need to
explain that in real life, the paint and toothpaste messes would not be OK if
handled as they are in this book.
And that is the difficulty with the extremely well-intentioned Oopsie-Do! Kubart and Richmond are so
determined to show young children that mistakes happen, are no big deal, and
are easily corrected, that they deliver the message with considerable
repetition and in a by-and-large serious manner. But without the leavening of
laughter, the notion that one little girl could make so many mistakes in a
single day may upset some kids instead of teaching them a valuable lesson. And
the idea that only some messes resulting from accidents need to be cleaned up
by the child who made the mistake, while others do not, is unlikely to be
something that parents want their children to take into the real world: the
cover picture in which the girl seems at most indifferent to what she has done
is a bit much for real life. Kubart and Richmond certainly deserve praise for
what they try to do in Oopsie-Do! But
the way they try to do it turns out to be a bit of an oopsie-do itself.
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