I had a conversation with a customer recently about children’s books, and somewhere along the way we started talking about Mo Willems.
Most parents of young children know Mo Willems. There’s Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!, the Elephant & Piggie books, Knuffle Bunny, and a whole collection of wonderfully simple, funny characters who have probably been read at bedtime approximately nine million times.
I’ve always liked his books. But there was a moment several years ago when I started appreciating the person behind them, too.
It was during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
It was March, 2020, and schools were closed. Businesses were closed. Everything familiar seemed to disappear almost overnight. As adults, we were trying to understand what was happening while simultaneously pretending, at least somewhat convincingly, that we knew what we were doing.
And I remember thinking about how strange it all must have felt to children.
Suddenly they weren’t going to school. They couldn’t see their friends or grandparents. Playgrounds were closed. Birthday parties were cancelled. Adults were worried and having hushed conversations about things kids didn't entirely understand.
Then Mo Willems showed up on YouTube with a piece of paper and a marker for “Lunch Doodles.”
His daily drawing program invited children to sit down with him and draw. He showed them his studio. He doodled. He taught them how to draw familiar characters and encouraged them to invent their own.
But what stayed with me wasn’t really the drawing. It was the way he talked to the kids.
He acknowledged that what was happening was strange. He talked about being worried and scared. He didn't talk down to them, and he didn't pretend everything was perfectly fine simply because they were children.
He treated their feelings as real. And watching him, I immediately thought of Mister Rogers.
I grew up watching Mister Rogers, and one of the things I understand much better as an adult is how unusual his relationship with children was. He spoke directly to them. He didn't perform at them. He respected them. Their fears weren't silly because they were little. Their questions weren't insignificant because adults already knew the answers.
In those strange weeks during the pandemic, I saw some of that same quality in Mo Willems, and it completely changed the way I looked at his books.
And once you recognize how seriously he takes children, you start seeing it everywhere in his work.
Willems has explained that he deliberately makes his characters simple enough for a five-year-old to copy. As a child, he drew Charlie Brown and Snoopy and used those all-too-familiar characters to create his own jokes and stories. He wants children to be able to do the same thing with Pigeon.
I love that.
A child doesn't have to stare at a blank piece of paper and somehow invent an entire world. Pigeon can be the starting point. They already know what he looks like. They know his personality. So they can draw him, change him, put him somewhere new and tell another story.
The character doesn't just belong on the page anymore. It becomes a tool for the child. And I think there is something wonderfully generous about that.
But perhaps my favorite observation from Willems is his belief that childhood—even a very good childhood—is inherently difficult.
His explanation is both funny and surprisingly profound: imagine waking up every morning and having someone three times your size make nearly every decision for you. Even something as insignificant as which mug you drink from might be decided by somebody else.
As parents, we know why this happens. Someone has to get everyone dressed. Someone has to decide when it's time to leave. Someone has to say no, we're not having ice cream for breakfast and yes, unfortunately, you do have to wear shoes to the grocery store.
But from the child's perspective? It must be incredibly frustrating.
Children are small people living in a world that wasn't built to their scale, surrounded by adults who have far more power, information and control than they do.
That idea has stayed with me because it asks something important of us as parents: to occasionally see the world from three feet off the ground.
It doesn't mean children get to make every decision. It doesn't mean we eliminate boundaries or let them drive the bus, no matter how persuasive the Pigeon may be.
It simply means remembering that their feelings about those boundaries are real.
And I think that is what I recognized in Mo Willems during those pandemic drawing sessions.
He wasn't simply giving parents something to occupy their children while everyone was stuck at home—although, let's be clear, I was extremely grateful for that too.
He was talking to the kids.
He seemed to understand that they were experiencing something difficult right alongside us. They deserved someone who acknowledged that. Someone who told them it was okay to feel scared or confused. Someone who invited them to sit down, pick up a pencil, draw something silly and make a little piece of the world their own.
Maybe that is why his books connect so deeply with children.
They are funny and wonderfully absurd. But underneath the humor is something else: respect.
Respect for children's ideas, their creativity, and their frustrations. There’s a respect for their enormous feelings about things adults sometimes consider very small, and a respect for the adults sitting beside them, reading the same book for the 47th time, helping them make sense of the world.
I liked Mo Willems before 2020.
But during a frightening and uncertain moment, I watched him sit down with children and essentially say: I know this is hard. I'm here. Let's draw.
And I've had a soft spot for him ever since.
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