Calm the F**K Down is the children's book we all need right now

There's long been a tradition of introducing kids to difficult subjects in the form of picture books. There's Ibram X. Kendi's odd counting book about how kids can confess their racism, Antiracist Baby. There's Jeanette Winter's Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg's Call to Save the Planet about the teen activist phenom. There was Maira Kalman's Fire Boat about 9/11, and now there's Calm the F**k Down!: A Covid Bedtime Story by the aptly named Ivana B. Dunne.

Tracking the emotional reality of the Covid crisis and distilling it into manageable bites, Dunne tackles the anxiety, the disinfectants, the incessant and ever-expected deliveries. With delightful illustrations from Walter Carzon, she pokes fun at face masks, toilet paper hoarders—remember those?—and the grocery washers.

Where Kendi's Antiracist Baby tells kids to "point at policies as the problem, not people," Dunne suggests that it's people and their individual attitudes about COVID that are precisely the problem. The Biden administration has identified both racism and COVID as top crises that he and his team of stalwart government policy makers intend to address, but when you get right down to the basic level, so much of this is personal. Can we each make our own COVID vaccine? No, but can we calm the f**k down? Yes, yes we can. Si, se puede!

The expert advice has been both monotonous and contradictory. At first we were told to wear a mask, then we were told not to, then we were told that we were only told not to because the experts didn't think we could cope with the idea that yes, masks help, but that medical workers need them more than the average person and that there might be short supply. Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, the World Health Organization, all got involved in manipulating the distribution of information. If, instead, they had calmed the f**k down, and treated Americans like adults, we might have been better off—we'd at least have been less freaked out.

Dunne takes aim at all of us, to an extent. Who among us has not sneezed and determined that we are on death's door? Who hasn't incessantly checked their temperature only to find that the thermostat was turned all the way up?

While schools were shut down for the early stages of the pandemic when we all thought civilization was going to come grinding to an early halt and we all began to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, life soon morphed into a new, worse-than-the-end-times normal. Zoom calls, Google Meets, and endless video chats replaced the apocalyptic scenarios we'd been imagining, and in some ways, these interfaces were a whole hell of a lot worse. Just ask any parent.

Dunne details, in brief, rhyming verse, the horror that is remote schooling. She writes, "Your kids want help during homeschool / (All the adjectives, adverbs and nouns…) / Can't remember that sh*t and you're working / Accept failure and calm the f**k down." It's a relief, in part, to know that pretty much everyone has felt this way at some point or another. Parents who used to be strict taskmasters when it came to academic achievement are now lost, along with the rest of us, in the digital morass.

Kids are home from college. Karens are screeding about face masks. Marriages are failing as spouses find that too much togetherness is a burden and loneliness at least brings with it the comfort of quietude. Alcohol is a pacifier. And as the days become one hazy blur and two weeks pass into months of endless, eternal, nothingness, the least we can do, the very least, is to tame our anxiety like a tranquilized tiger and seriously, just Calm. The f**k. Down.

Kendi's children's book calls for antiracist activism. Winter's kids' climate change message is all about altruistic self-sacrifice. But Ivana B. Dunne's message for kids, and adults, is clear: don't stress, don't pile up all that anxiety until you explode, don't add the extra weight of the world onto your shoulders, realize that we've experienced plague and pestilence before. Understand that being human doesn't mean you have to fix everything for everyone, and that you definitely don't have to believe all the hype.

Calm the F**K Down is a great book for parents and kids, and if you're worried about the swear words, don't be—they've seen far worse on those YouTube videos they've been watching on the sly when they were supposed to be doing social studies. Available from Amazon.