Interrupting Schemas: Papa as Caregiver in Interrupting Chicken

David Ezra Stein’s Interrupting Chicken introduces readers to the little red chicken, a boisterous and inventive child who can’t help interrupting her Papa’s bedtime stories. While the little red chicken’s antics are the centerpiece of the story, they play particularly well when juxtaposed with Papa’s calm, nurturing presence in the book. This interaction is a subtle, yet clear discarding of popular gendered schemas present in picturebooks.

The first doublespread of Interrupting Chicken shows Papa carrying the little chicken to her bed, freshly dressed in her pajamas and hollering for a bedtime story. There is a great deal of life and movement in this image, despite the fact the two characters feel less central to the image than the cozy bedroom they are in. Papa is placed in the image and the book as a whole as the little chicken’s primary caretaker, a role that is typically feminine in cognitive gender schemas. Such examples are rife in picturebook history; Goodnight Moon is a popular and ubiquitous example of a more traditional bedtime tale. Representations of fathers displayed as caregivers of children are somewhat more difficult to find. Karen Coats points out that “while there is a long tradition in children’s literature of girls transgressing gender norms by behaving as boys, there is no similar tradition of boys behaving in ways that have been traditionally coded as feminine” (366). While the schemas of gender in relation to parenthood are different than that of binary gendered childhood, Papa’s deviation from the schema of gendered parenthood is sufficiently uncommon as to be striking.

 Works Cited

 Coats, Karen. “Gender in Picturebooks.” The Routledge Companion to Picturebooks. Ed. Bettina Kummerling-Meibaurer. Routledge 2018.

Stein, David Ezra. Interrupting Chicken. Candlewick 2010.

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