Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature And American Political Conservatism

Raising Your Kids Right spotlights as a series of texts which offer information, ideology and even instructions for how to raise kids right, not just figuratively but politically. Taking us through text by William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, and Bill O’Reilly, as well as pro-logging rebuttal of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax and a series of evangelical Christian young adult novels that dramatize the end of the world and the return of Jesus. Abate’s work dispels lingering societal attitudes that narratives for young readers lack socio-political commentary and are unworthy of serious critical study. Indeed, they embody and important intellectual, material and culture component in the rise of the New Right and the power of millennial social conservatism.