The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers

Stan and Jan Berenstain's The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers is a gentle story for 5 year olds about how to be careful without being frightened of everyone.

What happens

Brother and Sister Bear are alike in lots of ways, but not when it comes to strangers. Brother is cautious and careful. Sister is friendly to a fault. She says hello to everybody. The butterflies, the frogs, the truck driver, the lady doing her shopping!

So Papa Bear sits her down to explain why chatting to strangers isn't a good idea. He does it in his deepest, most serious voice. He shows her scary headlines in the newspaper. Then, at bedtime, he reads her an old story about a silly goose who chats to a wily fox and doesn't come home.

Poor Sister can't sleep. The next day the whole world looks frightening. Even the trees seem to be reaching for her, and the frogs look mean!

Luckily Mama steps in with some good sense. While they make applesauce, she uses a barrel of apples to explain. Most strangers are perfectly nice, but you can't always tell from the outside which ones are the few "bad apples". So you follow the family rules, just in case.

What's clever is that it's Sister, not Brother, who ends up putting it into practice. When Brother gets chatting to a man with an amazing radio-controlled plane and is about to go off in his car, Sister grabs his arm and won't let him go. And Mama explains the difference between telling tales to be mean and telling because you're worried about someone.

It's quite a talky book, and very much a lesson in story form. That's exactly what makes it useful if you want an easy way into the conversation with a little one. The overreaction is actually the best bit. Plenty of children will recognise Sister's fright after a scary story (and it's reassuring to see Mama sort it out).

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Worth knowing, it finishes with a list of Brother and Sister's safety rules for cubs. One of them is about your body being your own, including your private parts, and not keeping secrets from your parents. It's pitched very simply, but you may want to read that page together.

What to read next

If your reader is fond of Sister Bear and her strong opinions, The Berenstain bears and the Trouble with Friends is another one where she has to learn something the hard way. A new cub moves in down the road who is every bit as bossy as she is.