Patience: A Celebration of Mindfulness

In Patience: A Celebration of Mindfulness, Kat Bovey and Katie Wilson have created a board book that explores the moments in life when children should use patience. Aimed at very young readers, this book unfortunately falls short in several ways. What was likely intended to be a gentle, meditative read-aloud, instead feels instructive and heavy handed.

For me, the overarching problem with this book is that it purports to be a celebration of mindfulness. Mindfulness is largely understood as focusing our awareness on the present moment; a form of calm attention and acknowledgment of that moment, regardless of what it entails. I would argue that Bovey and Wilson have somehow ignored this definition entirely. By repeating the phrase, “Have patience…”, the book is largely instructing children how to feel and/or act (e.g. with patience) regardless of what is happening around or inside them. For example: “Have patience with your feelings. Let the bad ones drift away” is at odds with the tenets of mindfulness. A board book about the intersections of patience and mindfulness would do better to help children be present with their feelings and acknowledge them all, in particular the bad ones.

The declarative sentence structure of this book was additionally problematic. Young children, understandably, do not generally respond well to commands. Yet, each page of the text commands children to have patience in some area of life and gives a somewhat condescending example of how to enact this. For example, “Have patience while you’re waiting. There are other things to do” reads like a cranky adult chiding their child to “be patient and do something else!” This seems, to me, both unpleasant and ineffective.

Though the illustrations are sweet enough on their own, they do not match the authoritative tone of the text at all. While this may have been a conscious decision, perhaps in order to soften the text, the final effect is a book that seems not to know itself. Every page features pastel-colored children smiling and, supposedly, being patient. I felt a gaping disjoint between text and image; the text is harshly told what to do while the images feature happy cartoon children who seem to be saying, “You’ll like being patient”. Many of us can attest to the fact that patience doesn’t always feel good. The discomfort of being patient does not, however, invalidate it.

Ultimately, if the author and illustrator wanted to create a board book about mindfulness, they would do well to first understand what mindfulness is and then imagine how mindfulness can deepen moments of patience. An exploration of why patience matters, no matter how it feels, would be a far more interesting read.