What’s this fascination with burps in kids books (and farts and poops)?

Jon Lymon's children's books are fart-free

Look, I get it. Sort of. Farts are funny. Burps moderately amusing. Poops, well, actually I don’t get the fascination with these at all.

Yet it’s hard to pass by a kids’ book webpage or a shelf in a bookshop without being assaulted by book covers with titles focused on the bodily functions. To have so many for sale suggests that parents must be buying this dump for their kids in their droves.

As a parent myself, while I might smile at a cover of a book with an elephant’s rear end on it, accompanied by the word ‘botty’ in the title, I’ll never be tempted to buy it. While it might amuse my child for the first read, what are they going to learn from it? That we all have bottoms that make noises? I think they can work that out for themselves.

That said, any parents who are buying books for their kids are to be commended. Kids who read for pleasure seem to be a dying breed, so I’m all for buying books for kids at a young age to get them into the habit of reading for fun.

It’s just the subject matter of some of the books that bothers me. There are so many great stories out there, so many funny books that don’t play for the cheap laughs that come from bodily noises.

I’m of an age that regards the word ‘fart’ as a bit of a swear word. Yes, you could call me an old fart and I wouldn’t argue. Back in the day, expulsions of air from the derriere were to be referred to as ‘bottom pops’ and more recently by my children as ‘bot bangs’. So I still see the word 'fart' on the front of a kids' book as a bit strange. A little bit rude.

Yes, I presume these books contain pages of innocent fun and illustration of air emanating from dragons' bottoms, but belches and parps are surely not a worthy subject for so many children’s books?

It’s the kind of easy-win subject I’d expect the unimaginative and talentless people who use AI to write books to focus on. You can usually tell their machine generated slop from the yellow-tinge to the cover illustration that suggests that the liquid result of another bodily function has been liberally sprayed all over the awful, overcrowded visual.

Proper authors who use their own imaginations could and should do better than resort to farts and burps to shift units.

For the record, all Jon Lymon books are guaranteed burp and fart free.