I would have posted this yesterday, but the dumb system (recently) doesn't allow me to post more than half a dozen times per DAY. Something like that.

I had no idea she and Elizabeth Levy were related! (Levy writes funny picture-book mysteries - she probably started those in the 1970s.)

Even more amazing is that the New York Times managed to beat...Wikipedia! (I checked the death records for January, to be sure. I can't imagine they would remove it.)

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/94121-obituary-robie-harris.html

Excerpt:

....Harris’s first book was also a collaborative effort: she co-authored the nonfiction book Before You Were Three: How You Began to Walk, Talk, Explore, and Have Feelings (Delacorte, 1977) with children’s author Elizabeth Levy, a close friend and her first cousin. In an interview with Leonard S. Marcus for the book You Can’t Say That!, (Candlewick, 2021) Harris explained that the book was inspired by the birth of her first child. She noted her own amazement at her son, and how her young nieces and nephews asked her endless question about the baby.

Harris stepped into the publishing ring solo with picture books Don’t Forget to Come Back (Knopf, 1978) and I Hate Kisses (Knopf, 1981). Several years later she embarked on an extensive new project while she was living in Boston—the work that would become her groundbreaking title It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, and Sexual Health (Candlewick, 1994). She did a copious amount of research consulting with doctors, nurses, psychologists, and scientists, and enlisted artist Michael Emberley—whom she knew a bit—to illustrate. Harris wanted to have a complete manuscript before submitting it to publishers, she told PW in a 2014 article celebrating the book’s 20th anniversary, because “it’s complicated and complex, and it’s loaded material for many people.” After Harris sent the project out to several houses, editor Amy Ehrlich at newly established Candlewick Press made an offer just two two weeks after receiving it.

It’s Perfectly Normal was later joined by It’s So Amazing!: A Book About Eggs, Sperm, Brith, Babies, and Families (Candlewick, 1999) and It’s NOT the Stork!: A Book About Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families, and Friends (Candlewick, 2006) to form what the publisher calls the Family Library. In addition to selling millions of copies, these titles have ranked among the most frequently challenged and banned books in the country according to the American Library Association. In an essay on this topic for PEN America, Harris wrote: “I write books for children because in some small way I hope that they will find the words I write useful, reassuring, interesting, and at times humorous and also in some small way help them to stay emotionally and/or physically healthy by giving honest, accurate, up-to-date, and age-appropriate information.” Similarly, she told Marcus, “This to me is the bottom line on freedom of expression. As a reader, you have the right to speak out for or against whatever you read. As a writer, I have the right to write whatever I want to write—and I am just not going to stop.”

She did not stop and worked diligently on periodic updates to the Family Library. The latest fully updated edition of It’s So Amazing was released earlier this month...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/05/books/robie-harris-dead.html

....Updated several times, “It’s Perfectly Normal” has sold more than a million copies and been translated into 27 languages, according to PEN America. The writer and pediatrician Dr. Perri Klass called it a “classic” in The New York Times in 2017. Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive officer of PEN America, said in a statement that Ms.. Harris’s books “were totally matter-of-fact in educating kids on these subjects.”

....Ms. Harris confronted the hostility without rancor. “I think that in this country there’s a range of opinions about what children should know,” she told an interviewer for LibrarySparks magazine in 2006, “and I think that many people feel that our children shouldn’t know about some of these things that have to do with sexuality, because, as adults, many of us weren’t talked to about these things..”

Even some who praised her have wondered if she had pushed too far in “It’s Perfectly Normal.”

“Is this too much? Harris wisely allows that it might be,” Jill Lepore wrote in The New Yorker in 2010, about an explicit part of the book. In Slate, Aymann Ismail wrote, “On virtually every page I stopped to examine, I was confronted with detailed drawings of genitals.”

But Ms. Harris told the interviewer: “Our kids already know about 99.9 percent of this stuff. What concerned me is that they have a lot of misinformation, no matter how much they tell us, and I wanted them to get accurate information.”...

Oddly, there were only 35 comments on the obituary before the section was closed.

A few:

Natalie, Chicago, Feb. 5
"I'm grateful to have grown up with this book, which taught me to view human bodies as normal rather than as objects to be feared and disgusted by..."

Hub, Grubber, Feb. 5
"Lots of wondering-aloud by parents and other adults worrying about child readers — but no comments or reflections from adults (i.e. former kids) who were her intended audience, and what they thought at the time?
"I would guess that such folks could actually say, rather than merely speculate, whether ‘It’s Perfectly Normal’ helped or, as hand-wringers fear, harmed them. Was it informative? Or life-altering? Or scandalizing?
"Or perhaps, ideally, they found it to be a little bit of all of those things — as knowledge, at least in my experience, often is."

HLM, USA, Feb. 5
"Either this sweet, caring lady who did her research can teach your child about sex or the biggest perv in their grade will. You decide, parents. My school yard perv showed up in 2nd grade and he loved having an audience. Kids were bringing in porn to class by 3rd grade. Sex is hardly hidden in this country."

Check out the one from Greg in Seattle, too. (Warning: It's about the complications of sexual abuse - and how it was decided to write about it, in the book.)

The comments in general remind me of the slogan that the late Dr. Sol Gordon famously coined: "Are you an askable parent?"

He even put it on a button, in the 1970s.

More on that (Gordon's name doesn't appear here, fwiw)

https://www.advocatesforyouth.org/resources/health-information/are-you-an-askable-parent/

She also had at least four entries in the "Something About the Author" encyclopedia series.

However, if I may play devil's advocate for a bit...here's something recent from Reddit/Childfree, though it's not anti-sex education, per se. NOBODY opposes sex ed in that forum, for obvious reasons.

(It's about the reasons for not having children in the first place - naturally.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/childfree/comments/1ajo0fr/i_dont_want_to_raise_kids_in_this_culture/?rdt=44796

Title: "I don't want to raise kids in this culture."

"For context, I live in the USA, but I'm sure this could apply almost anywhere.

"Even if you try to be a good parent where I live, so many of the other parents are lazy, and so many schools don't discipline students anymore. That's how you end up with the Teachers subreddit complaining of constant behavior issues. Kids are gonna pick up on their peers' behavioral problems, and I don't want my child coming home parroting misogynistic slurs or sexual moaning noises they heard someone utter in class.

"Sure, we've always had troublemaker kids. But things were different a couple of decades ago, when I was in school. You saw maybe one or two of these kids per classroom, and there were consequences for dangerous/inappropriate behavior. You didn't have half the classroom on Ritalin or behavioral IEPs.. You didn't hear of kids cursing out and even physically attacking their teachers like they do now.

"We're seeing these issues pop up earlier for a variety of reasons. Younger puberty + unrestricted Internet access + hypersexualized media is not a winning combination. Preteens are watching 'adult film' and then making inappropriate noises in class. Kids are hearing about sexual acts before they even have the maturity to comprehend these things. They also think fascism/Hitler and racism are a big joke. The 'disgruntled teen boy to alt-right nutjob' pipeline is very real. In order to raise a half-decent kid, you have to monitor their social life to a degree that just feels wrong.

"And don't come at me with 'just put your kids in private school.' I spent many years in a private Christian school and still dealt with a lot of this crap. Private, public, it's all the same IMO. And homeschooling just isn't an option for most families.

"So, yeah. Even if I wanted to have kids and raise them right, there's no way I could do that in a culture that sexualizes and radicalizes them. At least not without making massive sacrifices that just don't feel worth it to me. "

Two of the six responses:

"Yes, I agree. The 'disgruntled teen boy to alt-right nutjob' pipeline is very real. < damn, that's so true."

"A friend and I was talking about this, I don't want a child to grow up in an environment where being nice and good is consider weak."