What Bess Kalb Shares with Her Kids

The Art of Writing Children’s Books

Writing a picture book isn’t easy. Some people might think it is—especially if they’ve read enough bad ones—but writing a true gem of children’s literature is exceptionally hard work. Great children’s books make kids laugh and adults cry, have rhythm, meter, and great pictures, and somehow speak to something deep in a child’s soul, making them want to return to the pages again and again.

Bess Kalb writes very good children’s books. The one-time writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live shot to no. 1 on the New York Times best sellers list with her 2024 picture book, Buffalo Fluffalo, and is aiming to win over readers and story-tellers alike with its sequel, Buffalo Fluffalo and Puffalo, out now. Kalb’s stories for grown-ups are good too, whether it's Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, which she wrote about her grandma, or her Substack, The Grudge Report, which contains not just a ton of very funny political commentary but also the occasional joke about having to be a parent while society seemingly burns to the ground.

And as the mother of two little boys who are six and three-and-a-half, that’s certainly something Kalb can speak to. Here are the children’s books, YouTube series, and TV shows she loves watching with her kids.

Brick Science

In terms of screens, we have some very specific parameters around watching that always get broken. We really hammered into them that the iPad is for the weekends, and over the summer, that just totally fell apart.

My oldest is really, really into Brick Science, which are YouTube videos of some guy building cool things out of Legos in an increasingly professional looking studio space as his view count goes up thanks to my son. My six-year-old is getting a PhD in Legos and so his screen time is part of his clinical hours toward learning how to be a Lego expert.

Brick Science sounds academic, but it’s not. It’s just a guy being like, “Now let’s see if it can explode!” or, “We inhumanely put a little guinea pig on this to see if it would float.” But we love it, and it’s nice, and it’s better than my son falling off a piece of furniture or something.

Our Oceans

You’re catching me at a very self-satisfied time because over the weekend, both of my kids and their neighbor friend in our building sat and watched Barack Obama narrate a documentary about whales. (Ed. Note: It’s called Our Oceans)

It was a liberal mom fantasy come true. I even took a video of it, just in case I need to self-righteously send it to somebody who asks what it’s like to have children. Like, “Oh, it’s just this. They’re just watching our most recent lovely neoliberal President teach them about the importance of conservation.”

They loved it, but that’s mostly because the whales were huge and awesome. And Netflix can afford really good cinematography, too, just like they can afford a narrator with a Nobel Peace Prize.

Miss Rachel

This summer, my two-year-old twin niece and nephew visited us. And when they were here, my youngest, who’s three-and-a-half and spends his life trying to be a big kid like his older brother, got to cosplay as a baby a little bit and so he watched Miss Rachel.

We kind of shamefully missed the Miss Rachel phenomenon when my kids were little but now they’re making up for it. My three and a half year old, who speaks in full, impassioned and often mean paragraphs, is watching her go, like, “Can you say Mama? Mama?” because his cousins do.

He’s kind of coy about it, too, like this past Saturday morning, we were like “Do you want to watch Storybots? Do you want to watch Magic School Bus?” and he just super casually said, like there was a cigarette in his hand, “We could watch Miss Rachel.” It was like, “I feel like a lot of people were talking about Miss Rachel and so, like, if that’s what the group wants to do, I’m super down.”

Lilo And Stitch

When my kids watch a movie they become very Criterion Collection about it. They’re like, “We need to watch it again, so we’ll just really understand the subtext.”

Right now, they’re watching The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water in that way and it’s not good. But they also watched the live-action Lilo And Stitch movie dozens of times this summer. My son saw it in the theater with another one of his cousins, and so now he’s just chasing that high of eating popcorn and soft serve in a dark room with his favorite person on Earth by watching that movie over and over again. I think he’s watched it so many times he’s even off book at this point.

Octonauts

My sons will often declare something too scary that they have already watched many, many times.

Octonauts is a moving target for that. They love Octonauts, but sometimes, The Ring Of Fire is too scary. Sometimes, Octonauts and the Caves of Sac Actun is too scary. Sometimes Octonauts & the Great Barrier Reef is too scary.

I spend a lot of my time just trying to remember which one is too scary and which one will make Saturday morning a pleasant time for me and my husband to have a goddamn minute to drink coffee and doom scroll without being asked something.

Bluey, “Sleepytime”

I will admit that I use my kids’ screen time as my brain anesthesia time. While they’re zoned out watching their thing, I’ve become really good at completely disassociating next to them. The Octonauts could be saying things like “Let’s storm the Capitol,” and I’d be like “Sounds good, Peso!” while drooling into my phone: a perfect picture of hands-on Waldorf parenting.

I know I should monitor them better. I am a children’s book author and I am deeply invested in developing my own kids shows, but I also understand that when kids watch a show, that is a time for the parents not to be necessarily watching the show.

The exception to that rule is, of course, the “Sleepytime” episode of Bluey, where I weep while telling my kids stuff like, “I am the light to you as you are the light to me. I will always be here for you. I will go to college with you if you need me,” to which they just reply “It was fun that the planet cracked open.”

Roald Dahl’s Matilda

Like probably all parents, I have failed to indoctrinate my kids to my agenda, because they can tell when I’m thirsty for them to like something and immediately reject it. That goes through all aspects of life. But I did have a hit with Matilda, which my oldest son and I devoured recently. I read it to him, and it was really sweet. The little Quentin Blake illustrations are just enough for a kid like him who’s still very much learning to read to look at it.

The Wormwoods are an abusive family, though. I had to do some casual, on-the-fly editing at some points where I’d just say “‘You silly girl,’ the dada said,” instead of whatever other horrible thing was in there. I skipped the body image stuff around the Trunchbull too, versus waifish Miss Honey.

I guess there was a lot to skip, but there was more to save so the ratio felt fine. And my son came away from it being like “This smart girl uses magic with her mind” and goes to bed happy.

Mo Willems and X. Fang’s books

My sons love books that are sweet and silly in equal measure. So they love books like X. Fang’s We Are Definitely Human, where there’s a clear joke that kids are in on. I love books that include kids in the inside joke and that aren’t just, like, winking at the parent.

We Are Definitely Human is a book about aliens who say they are just visiting from Europe and the whole community rallies around them to help fix their spaceship, which they call their car. We all love it. It gives laughs for the whole family.

I think Mo Willems is exactly in that sweet spot too. There’s an essential distillation of pure comedy in Elephant And Piggie’s We Are In A Book, which is essentially Waiting For Godot. It’s an existential nightmare that has huge belly laughs in it. My kids go on a full emotional journey and they have tears in their eyes laughing. I love reading it to them to just see them react to it.

Oliver Jeffers’ Here We Are: Notes For Living on Planet Earth and Sophie Blackall’s If You Come To Earth

Here We Are is a book that I cry at while my kids just pleasantly absorb it like sociopaths. It’s an Oliver Jeffers book that explains the world to kids. I also love If You Come To Earth, which is a Sophie Blackall book. I feel like if there was a Venn diagram of those books, it would be a circle because they’re both explaining the world to a child, but we love them both and they’re complementary texts, not redundant ones.

Akiko Miyakoshi’s Little Shrew

There’s a book called Little Shrew that I like reading to both my kids. It’s about a shrew getting ready to go out and do business and have a nice little day at work. He puts on his clothes and commutes and comes home and makes himself a nice pleasant dinner and it’s so lovely. It’s a great before bed book.

A lot of children’s books I like are just existential meditations, but I also like the books that escape into a little gentle fantasy, like “Come into this dream world. Have some tea.”

Cirocco Dunlap’s Crunch The Shy Dinosaur

I really like Cirocco Dunlap’s book Crunch The Shy Dinosaur. She’s also a comedy writer who has written for a lot of really funny shows. The book is illustrated by Greg Pizzoli, too, and he does sweet, silly drawings.

Crunch feels like it doesn’t talk down to kids, but really brings them along. It tickles kids’ funny bones in a very specific way, while not trying to be funny for grown ups. There’s a joke in the book where “good night” is confused for “good light,” and the dinosaurs carry a bunch of lamps and no matter how many times I read it to my kids, it kills. It kills to the extent that they’ll use it as a callback, like when I’m leaving their room, they’ll say, “Hey, mama, good light.”

It’s honestly very exciting that I am a children’s book writer, because I love children’s books so much. I was forged in the fire of The Stinky Cheese Man growing up, plus a lot of Calvin And Hobbes books, and now I get to read those to my kids. Seeing them giggle and be amused makes me feel very connected to who I was. It’s a very fulfilling feeling.

Jimmy Kimmel, The Serious Goose

I’m not just saying this because I used to work for him, but we love Jimmy Kimmel’s The Serious Goose. My oldest has a signed copy of it, and he’s done a very assholeish thing where he’s showed it off on play date, like, “the writer of this book actually wrote it for me.” I had to be like, “No, but you have a mother who did that.” It didn’t matter, though. I will always be in the shadows.