Books editor
Jude Eaton
Jude Eaton is a children's-book scholar who edits The Cradle Press's Books for Kids section from a flat in Stockbridge.
Beats
Published in The Cradle Press
Outdoor Childhood
A Week With No Schedule in Late June
After a school year of camps, classes, and color-coded calendars, one family in Bloomington, Indiana tried a week in late June with nothing on it, and discovered how slowly children fill an empty day.
Books for Kids
The Wordless Picture Book and an Eighteen-Month-Old
What a toddler in a small flat in Lower Manhattan does with a book that does not contain any words.
Generations
The Family Archive: A Shoebox, a Hard Drive, and a Shelf
Eliot Bracken has been the unofficial archivist of his extended family for nineteen years. He is forty-four, an actuary, and lives in St. Paul. He keeps the family photographs on three external hard drives, the family letters in two Bankers Boxes, and the family stories on a Google Doc that is eighty-one pages long.
Food
The Birthday Cake We Make Every Year
Jude Eaton on the small, repeated, often imperfect cake that a family makes for the same child, year after year, and what changes when it does not change.
Early Years
Introducing the Older Sibling to the Baby
When Niall Donnelly-Eaton was born at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh on a Saturday morning in May, his sister Mairead, three and a half, was at home with her grandmother. The introduction, two days later, did not go as planned.
Family Rituals
Saying Grace Without Religion
A secular family in Edinburgh invented a small phrase to say before dinner and has been saying it for almost a decade.
Food
The Snack Drawer, a Quiet Revolution
Jude Eaton reports from three Edinburgh families on the small, low cabinet or drawer that has changed how children in the household eat between meals.
Sleep
The Night You Finally Let It Go
There is, in most families, a night when the parents stop trying to fix the sleep problem and simply live in it. Jude Eaton on the small mercy of giving up on the wrong project.
Generations
What Kids Inherit Besides Money and DNA
The Larkin family of Asheville keeps a wooden recipe box on top of the refrigerator. It contains 137 index cards, written in four hands across three generations. None of the recipes is famous. Most of them are for cake.
Books for Kids
Reading Aloud at Age Five Across a Year
Twelve months of nightly reading with a five-year-old in a stone house outside Edinburgh, charted month by month from picture books toward early chapters.
Early Years
The Language Explosion at Eighteen Months
On a Friday in late April, in a small house in Edinburgh, Saoirse Macleod-Eaton said the word 'moon' for the first time. By the following Wednesday, she had said it eighty-three times, and added eleven other words to her vocabulary.
Family Rituals
The Bedtime Canon at Four
The seventeen books a Brooklyn family read aloud night after night to a four-year-old, and what remained when the year was over.