Parenting & Family Quote by Dick Bruna

Bruna’s line lands like a small act of artistic defiance: children don’t need to be “smuggled” into reading by adult-side winks. In a publishing culture that often treats kids’ books as family entertainment - peppered with references meant to keep the grown-up awake at bedtime - he’s staking out a purist position. The child is not a pretext audience. The child is the audience.

The intent is almost ethical. Bruna frames attention as a kind of respect: you don’t bargain with it, you don’t dilute it, you don’t pad it with meta-humor to flatter adult taste. “No jokes for the parents” isn’t anti-parent; it’s anti-compromise. It insists that children’s inner lives are sufficient, that their sense of wonder and order is not a training ground for adult sophistication. That attitude maps cleanly onto his visual language: bold contours, pared-down scenes, calm color fields. The work is built to meet a child at eye level, not to perform cleverness over their head.

The subtext also nudges at power. Parents usually control the gate: they buy the book, they read it aloud, they decide what counts as “good.” Bruna quietly refuses that hierarchy. He’s saying: the adult’s approval is incidental; the child’s experience is the point.

Context matters here: postwar European design and children’s media prized clarity, function, and emotional steadiness. Bruna’s restraint isn’t emptiness; it’s confidence. He trusts that a book can be simple without being simplistic - and that a child can be taken seriously without being talked up to.