Love You Forever

Children’s author Robert Munsch published the popular picture book Love You Forever in 1986 as a way of grieving his two stillborn children. Overcome by this loss, Munsch wrote the book as an allegory of the unconditional and lifelong love that parents have for their children. Love You Forever chronicles the life of a boy as he becomes a man, as well as the life of his loving mother as she ages and eventually dies. The book has had two illustrators, Anthony Lewis and Sheila McGraw.

When the boy is young, he frequently exasperates and annoys his mother by getting into age-appropriate but less-than-ideal trouble. When he is two, he flushes her watch down the toilet and makes a huge mess in the house. When he is nine, he refuses to take a bath and accidentally curses in front of his scandalized grandma. His mother responds by saying that he is driving her crazy and that maybe the best thing would be for her to put him in a zoo.

But after the boy goes to bed, she crawls into his room, making sure he is really asleep, and then rocks him and sings him a little song:“I’ll love you forever. / I’ll like you for always, / As long as I’m living / my baby you’ll be.”



The relationship continues in the same vein into the boy’s teenage years. He gets into pop music and mild rebellion. His mother still crawls into his room every night and somehow manages to rock his sleeping body and sing him the rhyme that promises she will always love him.

Finally, the boy grows into a man and moves across town. But still, at night, the mother straps a ladder to the roof of her car, drives across town, crawls into his upstairs bedroom, wrests his giant hulking frame into her lap, and sings him the same song.

At long last, she calls to tell him that she is so old and frail, and that he should come see her. This time, instead of the mother singing to her son, he ends up singing a modified version of the song for her as she dies in his arms: “I’ll love you forever, / I’ll like you for always, / As long as I’m living / my Mommy you’ll be.”



The next scene shows the man cradling his own newborn daughter as he sings his mother’s lullaby to her. The implication is that the cycle of love and nightly rocking will continue with this new generation.

Since publication, the book has grown in popularity and remains one of the best-selling children’s books to this day. Nevertheless, some readers express reservations about the way this allegory of love is presented. Particularly troubling is the idea that the mother never expresses anything but annoyance and frustration with her son while he is awake, saving her affection for him only for times when he is completely asleep. Also troubling is the way she forces her way into his room when he is a teenager—and then when he is a grown man—since the implication seems to be that parental love is best when it entirely disrespects all acceptable boundaries. The thought experiment that the newly minted father will now force his way into his daughter’s room completes the discomfort that many readers experience.