Colm O'Regan: Why you should read Dr Seuss to your children

Roger Kenny Photography

On one of life’s strange bank holidays, time for a bit of introspection. A day to reread my favourite self-help book. It’s not The Seven Habits Of Highly Smug Langers or Believe in Yourself and Get A Loan From Your Rich Parents.

It’s Oh The Places You’ll Go by Dr Seuss. The children wanted it last week for the bed-time story. It looked long. I wasn’t up for reading it.

“We won’t have time for that. We’d have more time to read it if you had got into your pyjamas when I asked ye to...” was the petty reason I was giving.

Did you ever just catch yourself having an argument with your children on some minor rule that you just made up? 

Some illogical thing that you are just using as cover because at that particular moment, you’re trying to do the bare statutory minimum amount of parenting. 

Did you ever just listen to yourself saying something and think: “When did I turn into such a pain in the hole?”

“Just start it and see how you get on,” says the youngest, who is four but also seems to have some sort of qualification in people management. So we dove in.

And I realised I hadn’t properly read it before. Sometimes children’s books just ‘get you’. In two ways. They smack you in the face and also they seem to understand you.

Oh The Places You’ll Go starts out fairly Tony Robbinsy. ‘Today is your day. You’re off to Great Places! You’re off and away!’ The message is all ‘You’ll go far. You can be anything you want if you just believe.’

But this is Doctor Seuss so he’s not going to Pollyanna this. There’s a slight foreboding that comes from the weird dreamscape of the drawings. 

The walking elephant-tents, the faded-psychedelic colours, the acid-trip architecture that jars with the “You can be anything you want”. Something else is going on. Sure enough a third of the way through it turns:

“Wherever you go, you’ll top all the rest…except when you don’t, because sometimes you won’t.”

That simple 90-degree turn in the book is roughly most of the advice you’ll need in life. The colour of the book begins to change. “Your gang will fly on and you’ll be left in a Lurch”. Yep. Preach man. I know that feeling. 

The sky in the pictures turns a sinister geo-engineered pinky hue. I have to explain to the children what a ‘You’ll be in a slump’ means. “You know those days when Daddy spends all day writing five words?” They seem to get it.

OTPYG doesn’t let up. ‘You can get so confused that you’ll start to race …headed, I fear, towards a most useless place. The Waiting Place…for people just waiting’. Looks like the children will be awake all night pondering the pointlessness of adult existence. But wait! There’s an upturn ‘somehow you’ll escape’!

The book relaxes again. We’re headed off out for the night to where Boom Bands are playing. The elephants-tents are back. ‘You win on TV’. 

And then the good doctor smacks you right in the kisser again: ‘Except when you don’t because sometimes you won’t.’ Uh-oh. 

‘I’m afraid that sometimes you’ll play lonely games too. Games you can’t win, cause you’ll play against you.’ Hey go easy fella. They’re only kids. And I’m just 43.

Don’t worry, it finishes on the up again. But there’s no sentimentality or guarantee. I’m told I’ll move mountains but to get on with it.

The interesting thing is: The Two don’t mind it. This is real talk and they appreciate it. And they sleep like logs, apparently untroubled by life’s great balancing act.

Maybe the Doctor knows best. For all of us.