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“There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready.” –Maurice Sendak

We spend an awful lot of time and money trying to keep them entertained, but we can be dismayingly clueless about the range and depth of our children’s emotions, not to mention their capacity for absorbing and understanding difficult subject matter. There’s an ongoing battle to sanitize children’s entertainment, and the sanitizers are winning — I think most new parents have experienced the shock of reading a classic book or watching an old movie with their kids, only to realize that family entertainment used to be a lot more open about things like cruelty, violence, and death.

It’s easy to understand the impulse to protect our children from these things, but they’re part of life, and as much as I struggle with exposing my own kids to the darkness, I try to balance those protective impulses against the knowledge that by the time I think they’re ready, they’ll probably already have been exposed to whatever I’m worried about — and probably without my knowledge or input.

Award-winning author, illustrator, and noted curmudgeon Maurice Sendak, who passed away today at the age of 83, understood the value of darkness better than most, and to his immense credit, he fought the growing frenzy for “safe” kids’ media throughout his brilliant career. (Right up ’til the end, in fact: his last book, 2011′s Bumble-Ardy, elicited delicious gasps of horror from overly sensitive parents’ groups and critics.)

Time and again, Sendak’s books sent would-be censors into a tizzy, from the uproar over his classic Where the Wild Things Are (repeated years later, when Spike Jonze’s film adaptation was deemed inappropriate for children) to periodic rows with prudish adults like the librarian who used white-out to cover Mickey’s exposed penis in The Night Garden.

Sendak’s retort to that particular indignity was a letter that contained the priceless quote “It is only adults who ever feel threatened,” which is a pretty outstanding manifesto for his career. He became the world’s preeminent children’s author not because he had tremendous insight or singular artistic talent, although both of those things are true. He built his reputation on honesty. In a medium that prizes sentiment over emotion and platitudes over truth, he refused to ignore the reality of childhood — that as much as we might wish it weren’t, it’s often a very difficult time.

With books like Where the Wild Things Are, Sendak gave power to children by acknowledging the roiling, unpredictable frustrations of youth. What some saw as inappropriate was really just the truth — he was kind of like a kidlit gangsta rapper, in a way. And despite his reputation for being something of a crank, he understood his role and took it seriously. I love this quote from his interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, who asked him to share some his favorite reader’s comments:

I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a postcard and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim, I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

I think all the best children’s art reaches for that level of simple, irascible truth, and even though examples of it seem to be increasingly crowded out by brightly colored, bubble-wrapped product, Sendak’s enduring legacy (and the countless tributes written in his honor) serve as a reminder of how much we, and our kids, need artists who are willing to expend the effort. Morals, hearts, and rainbows can make us feel good, but I think it takes a pricklier type of tale to teach us something about ourselves — or to help us accept ourselves. Maurice Sendak excelled at that, and that, as much as anything else, is why we’ll miss him so much — and it’s what I’ll try to remember the next time I’m tempted to lunge for the remote or skip over a potentially troublesome passage in a book.

Childhood has changed a bit since I was a kid, but I refuse to believe that the boys and girls of today are so advanced that they’ve lost touch with the unique thrill of sitting down and getting lost in the pages of a comic book. I still remember jumping on my Huffy and heading down to my favorite neighborhood comics shop (yes, there was more than one to choose from), where I spent countless hours wandering the shelves and leafing through plastic-sheathed back issues I knew I couldn’t afford.

Good times, good times. And even though there are fewer of them left today, comic book shops are still around — and every year on the first Saturday in May, they remind us by throwing a giant party with Free Comic Book Day. Oh hey, look at the calendar — the first Saturday in May is tomorrow.

Visit the Free Comic Book Day website to search for your nearest store and catch up on the latest in comics news. Here’s last year’s video for the event:

Brad Meltzer is a solid writer and a really fascinating guy, and his nonfiction bestseller Heroes for My Son (followed more recently by Heroes for My Daughter) is a truly beautiful, heartfelt expression of a father’s deep love and boundless hope for his child. So it makes perfect Hollywood sense that there’s a movie adaptation in the works — and that Adam Sandler is producing it.

I don’t have any particular axe to grind with Sandler, although I suspect that’s because, in spite of my line of work, I’ve been able to avoid most of his worst films — I don’t think I’ve seen one since Spanglish, which I kind of liked, unlike most of the critics who wrote it up. But a movie hardly needs to be made from this book, and Sandler hardly seems like the guy to make it.

It isn’t that Heroes for My Son is a towering work of literary genius, and I’m not arguing that it’s without a certain measure of dewy-eyed New Age dippiness. But Meltzer wrote it from a place of tenderness, good humor, and unconditional love, and if there is a guy in Hollywood who can translate that to the screen without tipping into mawkishness, I don’t think it’s Sandler.

Why does it matter? Because there aren’t enough movies about good relationships between fathers and sons — about the pride we feel for our children, the dreams we have for them, the endless, complicated struggle to show them how to be kind and strong and honest and true. I’m not sure what fart jokes, Rob Schneider cameos, and syrupy third acts have to do with any of that.

Of course, all that stuff sells tickets, which is why Sandler has enough money to go around optioning movie rights to bestselling books, and I don’t begrudge him any of that. This is just another example of Hollywood doing what it does — I only wish they’d done it a little differently in this case.

I know a lot of artists who are ambivalent about it, but I love the Kickstarter model — it gives consumers a more tangible level of ownership in an artist’s work, and it also makes us wait for what we want in an age when what we want is often only a click away. We don’t often get to anticipate things anymore, you know? I think that’s important.

And speaking of which, I’m anticipating the fall 2012 release of Roger Nix, President at Six, the new book from author Nick Dazé. You see that nifty illustration above? It’s from a story that Nick describes like this:

The story is about kindergartener Roger Nix, an ordinary boy: Roger loves kindergarten, playing make-believe, and hanging out with his imaginary friends (a baby donkey named Jack and a baby elephant named Abe). But when he learns about the plans of Old Man Plee, a perennial presidential candidate, to shut down schools and send kids to work in factories as an austerity measure; Roger decides to run against Old Man Plee as a defender of “school and summer vacation, learning and imagination”. Of course Abe and Jack are there to help him every step of the way.

Written in clever Seussian rhyme and illustrated by Bill Robinson, Roger Nix is a little more than $8,000 away from its $30,000 goal with just a couple days to go in its campaign. A $30 pledge will get you a first-edition hardcover copy of the book and a campaign bumper sticker. I didn’t even need to see the trailer embedded below before I kicked in. How about you?

Comics are a terrific example. As we discussed a few days ago, the general malaise suffered by the publishing industry is reflected pretty sharply in kid-targeted titles, where the last 20 years have been marked by a more apparent willingness to try new and crazy things to hang onto their target demographic’s attention. The drive to digital, accelerated by the advent of tablet computing over the last few years, has posed a brutal conundrum for comics — consumers are buying fewer paper copies, but the publishers haven’t been able to embrace ebooks without alienating the independent shops that have been their bedrock for generations. It’s prompted a weird series of tentative steps and half-measures that haven’t satisfied anyone.

Marvel finally looks like they’re ready to change all that with their recently unveiled “Infinite Comics” initiative. Like most things comics-related, it arrives with an avalanche of silly hyperbole, but after years of tinkering with the format, Marvel actually has something to crow about this time — if the first “infinite” title, Avengers vs. X-Men: Infinite #1, is anything to go by, we could finally be looking at the future of the medium. And with something to offer older readers as well as new fans, that future could be surprisingly bright.

Marvel Comics

As any comics fan could tell you, digital comics are nothing new — and neither are tablet-optimization schemes like the dreadfully annoying “Motion Comics.” What’s different here is that instead of just trying to wedge traditional content into the digital sphere, Marvel’s Infinite Comics have been designed to actually try and bridge the gap between paper and the screen — the artwork doesn’t move, necessarily, but it does use an assortment of subtle tricks to guide the reading experience, forming a sort of hybrid between a traditional comic and something like a film. It’s cinematic without being pushy about it.

The best example of this technology in action in Avengers vs. X-Men #1 is the way the comic shifts focus in a single panel. These screencaps don’t truly do it justice, but they’ll give you an idea of what I’m talking about:

It’s a nifty effect. Nothing breathtaking, but that’s sort of the point, at least as I see it; touches like these take advantage of the tablet’s capabilities without fundamentally altering the experience of reading a comic. It’s smart, and in some ways, I think it might even be preferable to reading on the printed page — as writer Mark Waid, Marvel Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada, and Senior Editor Nick Lowe discuss in their “commentary track” for the issue over at Comic Book Resources, one key difference is that writers can design the story to preserve the element of surprise. You can’t accidentally glimpse a panel on the next page, because it isn’t on the screen; the creators are guiding you through the experience at the right speed.

What this will mean for Marvel’s relationship with the shops, I have no idea. But if the comics industry has a prayer of getting readers to make the jump to digital, I think it has to start with Infinite Comics — at least based on this issue, they’re smartly done and affordable ($3.99 for the 99-page issue, which bundles the “infinite” book in with the plain ol’ vanilla “HD” Avengers vs. X-Men #1). I haven’t been a real comics reader since the ’80s, but now that my son is developing a superhero obsession, Marvel could bring me back into the fold.

(It also bears mentioning that the company has rolled out a Marvel AR app, which gives readers video and assorted extra content when they scan in QR and/or barcodes with their device, but I find that kind of thing a lot less interesting, so I haven’t tried it. Feel free to let me know if you think I’m missing out.)

These were pre-Internet days, you understand, when a major media corporation could do something like publish a vaguely dirty satire magazine eight times a year and force its readers to wait patiently for the next issue. And not only that, but we actually had a shared culture back then, full of ripe targets that just about anyone reading would be familiar with. I’m not saying it was the golden age of satire, but none of us knew we were living at the end of the era when the act of smuggling a cheap bundle of newsprint home in your backpack was still a defiant thrill. MAD wasn’t always funny, not even then, but it was awfully cool.

Of course, like any satirical institution, MAD has been fending off charges of dwindling quality and cultural irrelevancy almost from the beginning; as art director Sam Viviano once quipped, everyone thought the magazine was at its best “whenever you first started reading it.” But looking back, I think it’s hard to overstate its influence — not only on American humor, which has absorbed its gleefully irreverent tone so thoroughly that MAD’s version now seems stupidly quaint, but on its generations of readers.

Bookshelves could be filled with everything that’s been written about the long shadow MAD cast over pop culture, but I think it’s worth restating here, if only briefly, that everything parents hated about the magazine — its rude humor, the vulgar joy it took from tipping sacred cows, its (frequently, depressingly correct) assertion that everything was a stupid waste of time, including MAD itself — was what made it not only so entertaining, but such a powerful educational tool.

Yes, I really wrote that, and let me explain: MAD treated you like you were smart enough to get the joke, even when you weren’t, and trusted you to figure things out for yourself when the gags were over your head. (As Salon’s David Futrelle remembered, “I seem to remember asking my parents what ‘graft’ was.”) And maybe more important, I’d argue, is the way MAD’s sneering tone helped its young readers learn critical thinking. Writing that makes me feel funny, but I think it’s true. As Brian Siano put it in the Humanist: “For the smarter kids of two generations, MAD was a revelation: it was the first to tell us that the toys we were being sold were garbage, our teachers were phonies, our leaders were fools, our religious counselors were hypocrites, and even our parents were lying to us about damn near everything.”

But as time wore on, MAD stopped seeming so subversive. By the time The Simpsons started ruling Sunday nights, its laff-a-minute pace and jaundiced view of everything were pretty much the norm. During the ’90s, we gorged ourselves on cynicism and irony, and as the grandaddy of it all, MAD couldn’t help but look old and out of touch. And as the 21st century dawned and the monoculture really started to fray, worthwhile targets for the magazine started drying up — between that and the problems facing the print industry in general, it’s pretty impressive that MAD’s still publishing at all, even if most of us think its best days are far behind it.

All of this is why, even though I haven’t picked up an issue of MAD since the ’80s, I decided to check out its new iPad app. If Cracked can reinvent itself as one of the Web’s smartest humor destinations — and roll out its own killer app — why not MAD?

The answer to that, if you’re already tired of reading, is “because MAD isn’t funny anymore.” But if you want details, here they are. What MAD’s offering here is a digital subscription to the magazine — it downloads to your iPad’s Newsstand for $4.99 an issue or $9.99 for a one-year subscription. Because I’m an optimist, I took a chance and opted for the subscription option, figuring if I liked it, the extra five bucks would be worth it. The result? To cop a phrase from the magazine’s glory days: Echh.

It just isn’t funny. I think this is partly because, as I said, there aren’t as many viable targets these days — as you can see above, this issue’s main feature makes fun of Mike & Molly, which is a decent-sized hit by today’s standards, but with an average viewership of around 11 million per episode, it’s far from a cultural flagship. That kind of scrambling means filling out the rest of the magazine with lame potshots at easy targets like Twilight and the GOP candidates, and bungling a Hunger Games lampoon by settling for screenshots from the movie with horrible fake lines pasted over them.

I didn’t go in expecting to laugh at all of it, or even most of it, but I was hoping for at least one guffaw, and I didn’t even get a lousy chuckle. In fact, I was bored while reading it, which is probably the worst thing I can say about a magazine I used to have to hide from my parents. By the time I got to the end — a double dose of MAD fold-ins — I was just kind of sad.

I’m not sure it’s all MAD’s fault, because outside of really heinous acts of cartoon violence, I’m not sure I can imagine anything it could publish that would make me forbid my own kids from reading it. Times have changed, and our cultural mores have shifted to such a degree that I don’t know if a magazine like MAD can really be subversive anymore. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure they could do a better job of being silly and dumb. Maybe I just picked the wrong issue to start with, but if this is where MAD is these days, they should just stop. It’s embarrassing.

From a technical standpoint, the app isn’t bad at all; like Wired or Entertainment Weekly, it offers magazine content that’s been optimized for tablet viewing, with an animated cover, tap-and-zoom navigation, and sharp text on the new iPad’s Retina display. If they can ever figure out how to put together worthwhile content, they’ve built themselves a decent delivery mechanism — but you shouldn’t hold your breath waiting for that, or waste your money on a subscription. Stick with the far funnier (and free!) content being cranked out on a daily basis over at Cracked.

Last week, Jeremy Greenfield at Digital Book World published an editorial titled “When Growth in Children’s E-Books Hits the Poverty Line.” You can read the whole thing at the link, but basically, the article points out two things:

1. In general, children’s book publishers are making a lot less money from ebooks, and
2. Low-income children are being deprived of access to digital content.

Both of which are demonstrably true. The first item, as Greenfield notes, is affected by a number of factors — and I’d argue that the main one is what he refers to as “the tactile nature of many children’s books.” Put another way, I think a lot of parents don’t see the value in tablet versions of books for young children; it can be a lot more fun (and a lot easier on your electronics) if you supply them with board books that they can hold, chew on, and otherwise abuse.

Because of what I do (as well as my general fondness for gadgetry), we’ve muddled around with a few ebooks at Dadnabbit HQ — and a lot of them are quite good, whether they’re presented as “books” or “apps.” Titles like Hugless Douglas, A Duck in New York City, The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore, and The Monster at the End of This Book are all beautifully made, and they all add a layer of interactivity that you can’t get from a paper book. I’m not saying it’s better, just different.

Animation and sound effects aside, though, my kids don’t really care. At the end of the day, they never ask for those titles at storytime — they always, without fail, pick books from the shelf. (And that includes the Kindle shelf, where I store the digital chapter books we read, like The Secret Zoo.) I don’t know if it’s because they think of those other ebooks as games or just because they’d rather be read to from the paper page, but for the most part, Douglas and his friends collect digital dust.

I’ve been thinking about Greenfield’s editorial a lot over the last week, and no matter how many ways I approach the issue, I’m not convinced we need to worry about this ebook poverty gap. I’m sure publishers do, but that’s another story — when it comes to low-income kids, I think what we really need to worry about is the wave of public library closings that American cities have been facing for years now. I think the health of our library system affects us all, but it really has a tremendous impact below the poverty line, and that won’t change no matter how many families manage to get their hands on an e-reader or tablet.

Again, I’m not opposed to children’s ebooks. I’m just not convinced that adding music and animation creates an essential experience that’s truly appreciably different from just sitting down and reading. I suppose you could make the argument that this is broadening the cultural divide that started to open with radio and television, and I don’t know enough to argue about the long tail effect of low-income kids being forced to catch up with their more gadget-equipped peers. It certainly seems, though, that we’re looking at the front edge of a technological shift — albeit one that doesn’t seem to be as profound as, say, the advent of home computers. A tablet isn’t really built to teach you meaningful skills — it’s there to encourage consumption, and while (again) I’m not knocking consumption in and of itself, I’m just not convinced that lack of access to apps or ebooks constitutes a meaningful disadvantage. It can certainly be symptomatic of one, but again, I think we should be much more worried about what those symptoms indicate on a broader level.

Or maybe this is just a generational knee-jerk reaction — a bout of grumpy old man shrugging? I’m perfectly willing to concede that I may not have a firm enough grasp of the big picture here. What do you think — is an ebook poverty gap something we need to worry about?

And they’re wonderful. The three-disc set of video storybooks (available Nov. 22) is a great wind-down tool for a holiday-crazed little one. It includes 20 stories, most based on Caldecott-honored children’s books. Named for 19^th century illustrator and children’s publishing innovator Randolph Caldecott, they wouldn’t be here if the images weren’t child-beloved and visually stimulating. None live up to the honor more so than “The Snowy Day,” probably the most famous and treasured picture book ever. Scholastic captured Keats’ book in that it’s just as gentle, beautiful, and quiet as the book, or a real snowy day.

“Snowy Day” leads off a whole disc of Keats stories, which also includes “Whistle for Willie” and “Pet Show.” The second disc is all animal stories, including “In the Small, Small Pond,” and the wonderful cap-thieving monkeys of Esphyr Slobodkina’s “Caps for Sale.” The third disc: all duck stories. Special features: Spanish versions of a lot of the stories, and open-captioning, or as its encouragingly called, a “read-along” option. It’s three and a half hours of classic, innocent, warm toddler books, video versions of a great early library.

Either your kids will recognize and enjoy these video versions because they know the books, or the videos will make them want to read the books, which you probably have already. Or you should have already. Why don’t you own “Snowy Day” or “Caps for Sale”?

To make up for it, sort of, here’s a brief rundown of some of the better family-friendly books I’ve enjoyed lately. Nothing I write here will do justice to the authors’ work, but if you’re looking for reading recommendations, maybe I can point you and your kids in the right direction. Without further ado:

Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Oh, how I love this book. If I remember right, it started life as a series of posts, which gathered enough fans that Valente was able to crowdfund publication of her novel — which went on to become a New York Times bestseller.

The book’s success is richly deserved. I picked it up on a whim during a trip to our local bookstore, and was immediately drawn into the funny, exciting, scary, and downright moving tale of September, an impetuous 12-year-old girl from Omaha who finds herself whisked away on an adventure that combines familiar elements (anyone who’s read Lewis Carroll or the Oz books won’t be able to resist a knowing grin) with Valente’s marvelously unique prose.

It’s my favorite family book of the year, by far, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you have very young or very easily frightened kids, it might push the envelope a little in terms of peril and/or violence, but I only did some very, very light editing in the grimmest spots, and my kids were five and three when we read it. We all can’t wait for the sequel(s).

Wendy Mass, The Candymakers
Kids in a candy factory, all trying to win a contest…sounds familiar, right? Not to worry — although The Candymakers might have a troublesomely Wonka-esque premise, the book really just uses it as a springboard for an artfully constructed mystery with strong themes of friendship and trust.

The Candymakers uses four protagonists to tell its story, all kids with markedly separate personalities (girls, just wait until you get to know Daisy) and some sort of secret to be revealed. They come together during the two days leading up to the annual Confectionery Association Conference, all chosen as contestants in a big contest to create a new candy. If you’re already guessing that they’ll each learn a lesson about teamwork, you’re right, but Mass manages to add a few wrinkles to the formula.

This is a solid book for boys and girls from across the K-5 spectrum — my daughter loved it, and she just started kindergarten, and my wife is currently reading it to her third and fourth graders.

William Joyce, The Man in the Moon (The Guardians of Childhood)
The brief prologue to an intended series about the magical beings that watch over the kids of Earth (including Santa, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and — you guessed it — the Man in the Moon), this book is short enough to read in a few sittings, but it sets up a whopper of a saga, and it’s packed with gorgeous illustrations.

Without giving too much away, I’ll just tell you that Joyce lays out loads of ready-made mythology here, drawing on the hokey characters every kid knows by heart to construct the boundaries of a world that has the potential to be as rich and inviting as Piers Anthony’s Xanth (although I suppose a more apt comparison would be his Incarnations of Immortality series, but whatever).

Put simply, there’s a long and epic war being waged for the children of the universe, and the lines are drawn between the Guardians of Childhood and Pitch, the King of Nightmares. Of course, it’s a story that has its scary moments, but more than anything, it’s exciting — you already knew Joyce was a fabulous illustrator with a finely tuned sense of whimsy, but it turns out he also has an amazing gift for pacing a kids’ book like an action thriller, not to mention describing fast-paced battles. In other words, my four-year-old son loves it.

In fact, we’ve already moved on to Book One of the series, Nicholas St. North and the Battle of the Nightmare King, which reveals the origin of the young Russian bandit who eventually becomes…well, we can talk about that later. Start with The Man in the Moon, and thank me later.

That’s it for now, but I’ve already got a Kindle queue bursting with books begging to be read to my kids, so I’m sure I’ll be back for more. Happy reading!

For as long as the human race has been able to hear music, we’ve wanted more. And once upon a time, we quenched that thirst by picking up an instrument — or gathering around someone else who had one — and making music happen.

Over time, we learned to develop technology that helped us satisfy our craving — and as more of us learned to use radios, record players, tape decks, CDs, mp3 players, and smartphones, and grew accustomed to a world in which music was never more than an arm’s reach (or the click of a button) away, the further we drifted from that innate urge to create. For a lot of us, music has become something we’re meant to passively consume.

I don’t think it’s supposed to be this way, and neither do a growing number of artists dedicated to reconnecting families with the joy of making music for its own sake, including Nerissa and Katryna Nields. The veteran folk duo recently released All Together Singing in the Kitchen: Creative Ways to Make and Listen to Music as a Family, a book/CD package with something for homestyle musicians of all ages, and they were kind enough to take a few minutes out of their busy promotional schedule to talk to us.

I talk to a lot of artists who express the ideas you’ve written about here. This book seems to be part of a movement.

Nerissa: Yeah. Well, that’s a nice bit of serendipity for us. One of the things we say in the book, and it’s absolutely true, is that it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I heard the recorded versions of a lot of the folk songs I’d grown up with. My dad did have a turntable, and he did play a lot of music, but he was playing what he wanted to hear — ’70s country LPs he’d bought, and occasionally classical music. Mostly, the songs we knew, we knew because he played them on the guitar. That’s how we learned them. That’s how you make a song your own, by passing it down through the oral tradition, rather than making a recording out of it.

I have a lot of respect for recording, too — obviously, we’re recording artists. But in terms of raising kids, I think it’s so wonderful to make a song your own. And that’s kind of what we do in all realms — we’ll take a beloved folk song and change the words, and encourage the kids to make their own versions.

Katryna: Observing art can be a transformative experience, but making art is almost always a transformative experience. And I think people are starting to realize that again. I mean, a ukulele…you can pick one up and really know how to play a song in probably three months. That’s an exciting and liberating gift that it seems like people are beginning to rediscover.

I think my favorite story from the book is the one about the woman who inherited a mountain dulcimer and didn’t even think about learning how to play it until a random stranger suggested it — and then watched as music became a huge part of her child’s life.

Nerissa: Isn’t that amazing? I think it’s so inspiring.

It’s inspiring, but it also speaks to this weird disconnect we’ve developed in our relationship with music, where we can have an instrument literally in our hands and not think about playing it. Do you have any thoughts as to how we got to this point?

Katryna: Well, there was a time when the only way you could hear music is if you made it yourself. Even when we were kids, we had a turntable, but even then, it was a little bit of a cumbersome thing to put it on the turntable, get up and change it after 22 minutes or whatever it was, and in our cars, we had AM radio, and that was it. Now, it’s easy to carry a million songs around. You can see someone not wanting to learn how to play an instrument because all you need is an iPod.

Maybe, though, the pendulum is swinging in the other direction. I know that when I go to singalongs now, people often like to have iPads in the room so they can have the lyrics and chords handy. The marriage of that technology with the simplicity of the guitar is such a cool thing to see.

Nerissa: I do think that our relationship with technology tends to move in a wave pattern. It takes a few leaps forward and we all go whoa, and then we catch up and make it our own, and then it leaps forward again. I think we’re in a catching-up phase right now. I think it would be interesting to chart the ebb and flow of folk music’s popularity against the technological tide — I wonder if one has anything to do with the other.

I often think about an old quote from Pete Seeger where he talked about being ambivalent about making albums, because he was worried that he was sort of tacitly encouraging people to be passive. We take recorded music for granted now, but at the time, it was a real decision for an artist to make, and I think it’s still thought-provoking.

Nerissa: For me, the two things definitely went hand in hand, because I remember being really daunted, as a teenager learning how to play guitar, by the things the Beatles were doing. I think it all depends on the attitude you take, and hopefully, what we’re giving people with this book is a “yes you can” attitude.

I wanted to talk about that message. Reading it reminded me of a time in the ’90s when I was talking to a producer about the way newly affordable recording technology had led to an explosion in self-released albums, and his response was that everyone thinks they have a right to make music, but they’re wrong.

Katryna: Well, that’s just commerce getting in the way.

Nerissa: I wouldn’t even say it’s commerce — I’d say it’s ego. I have a writer friend with whom I had a similar conversation in the early aughts, when self-publishing was starting to take off, and they had the same basic response. But good work rises and falls on its own merits.

Katryna: And also, the idea that every reader and every listener…I mean, is Lou Reed a good singer? I don’t know. But there are people who are moved beyond words by what he does, and how tragic would it have been if he’d decided he couldn’t sing and just not done it? It’s silly to think there’s a good and a bad when it comes to art. Some of the most moving recordings I’ve ever heard have been by complete amateurs.

I think when you invite this kind of stuff — writing, drawing, singing, crafting — into your life, what you’re doing is instilling a love of creativity in your kids. And no matter what their job ends up being, they will have that as part of their vocabulary. This way of not seeing the world as a boxed-in, linear thing, but something full of possibilities.

Nerissa: Right. The benefits of having music in your life are well-documented, but they bear repeating. It really pays dividends in terms of how it shapes the brain, and the heart, and the soul, in ways that are incalculable.

Katryna: I think one of our main theses with this book is the idea that by using music, you’re forging connections with your children that will hopefully remain throughout your family’s life. Some people do it by watching baseball with their kids. For us, it’s been music — that’s been the glue. It’s created pathways for us to communicate, and to remember that we’re from the same world. That we can be helpful to each other.