Normally, bedtime is a pretty no-nonsense checklist — showers, pjs, teeth, bedtime stories, and lights out. But there were nights last year, reading the Dog Man series with my son that sparkle a bit in my memory. Like our dive into Dog Man: Mothering Heights, when my son lost it over the hilariously rewritten lyrics to Take Me Out to the Ballgame. Within seconds, I was gone too — cackling, crying real tears, my vision blurred. My husband paused in the doorway with a curious smile, like he couldn't quite place the sound of his wife laughing that hard after 8 pm on a school night.
From the gleefully silly rewrite of The Greatest Love of All through to the final “How 2 Draw” pages at the end, we were breathless with laughter. These were just a few moments among many over the course of weeks reading the series, when my serious “it’s time to go to bed” parent persona fell away. I was startled to find that my sense of humor wasn’t all that different than my 8-year-old son's. Just the two of us, wiping away tears of laughter, late at night.
While side-splitting humor might be one well-known characteristic of the series, the thing that continues to resonate far more is the real tenderness and heart that also took my breath away in an entirely different way. The humor sits alongside words of wisdom that we often read aloud twice to let them hang in the air a little bit longer.
As we spent my son’s 2nd-grade year navigating themes like how to make friends, how to be a friend, what’s “cool,” and what it means to be brave, imperfect, and honest with others — Dog Man and his unlikely family taught us some lessons about friendship that have continued to become touchstones for our son.
Related: Catch Up on Every Book in the Dog Man Series
Here are a few of our personal favorites:
1. You can be a friend, even when someone might not deserve it yet. Petey starts the series as a cat who seems to be a pretty cut-and-dried criminal, constantly scheming, friendless, and calculating. As we got to Dog Man: Grime and Punishment, we had a peek behind the curtain as to why: a hard childhood, a sick mom, an absent father, a lifetime of pushing people away before they could abandon him first. As Petey confesses his childhood to Lil’ Petey, “Look – your Grampa … he ABANDONED me and my mom!”, I felt my son go still next to me in a moment of sympathy. It was the swift realization that the people who are the hardest to like are often the ones who need it most, and that "he doesn't deserve kindness yet" and "he needs kindness anyway" can both be deeply true.
2. Friends are the family that you get to choose, and that’s huge. Lil’ Petey starts the series as a clone, created by Petey to be a smaller, more obedient version of himself. Then, in A Tale of Two Kitties, Petey starts to actually love him. Not because he's supposed to. Because he does. Their relationship becomes something that looks less like a villain-and-sidekick and more like an actual family — messy, imperfect, chosen every day rather than given once. These were moments where my son and I had a chance to talk about what actually makes someone family. For a kid figuring out what "family" means beyond the people he was born to, watching these two cats build one from scratch was a quietly enormous idea.
3. Friends are bigger and stronger than any embarrassment. Early on in The Scarlet Shedder, Dog Man ends up skunked, humiliated, and, thanks to a tomato juice mishap gone wrong, bright red. It's slapstick, it's silly, it’s stinky, it's exactly the kind of thing that gets an 8-year-old cackling. But underneath the joke is something smaller and truer: his friends don't leave. They don't even flinch. They just try to help, badly, and stay anyway. It echoed all those very real elementary school experiences my son was having, from the acute fears of embarrassment to the terror of trying something new and failing in front of classmates. It's a low-stakes, funny way into a genuinely hard question for a second grader: will people still like me if I'm a mess? If I make a mistake? If the friends are real, it’s not even a question.
4. A friend is going to believe in you when you don’t believe in yourself. Big Jim, introduced in Big Jim Begins and given his full arc in Big Jim Believes, is built almost entirely out of big-hearted sincerity; no cynicism, just relentless, earnest belief in the people around him, even when they don't believe in themselves yet. Big Jim is every goofy, unflappable, doggedly positive kid that is never seated at the cool kids’ lunch table. He’s the kind of character a kid could roll his eyes at, but my son didn't. I think because his belief in others just feels SO good. Dav Pilkey has said the whole series became for him a kind of love letter to his parents – grateful for their belief in him even when he didn't believe in himself. That's not subtext. That’s what the series is for. Whether it’s Chief and Dog Man, or Petey and Lil’ Petey, belief in others surrounds every friendship in the books and every real friendship outside of them.
If belief is what friends give each other, goodness is what makes it worth giving. Nowhere is it clearer than in a conversation between Petey and Li'l Petey in Lord of the Fleas. Petey, in one of his darker moments, lays out the case that the world is cold, cruel, not worth the effort. Li'l Petey doesn't argue the premise. He just keeps answering it, line by line — you've got to be good anyway, kind anyway, honest anyway, happy anyway, creative anyway — until the argument for despair collapses under the weight of his refusal to accept it. "Ya gotta be good anyway, Papa," is the line that's stuck with me the longest and the one I urge with my own son. Not because the world is good — but anyway.
You may go looking for a funny series to read with your kids. What you won’t expect to be handed, over and over, are some of the clearest lessons in friendship and goodness you’ll come across, from a cat, his cloned kitten son, and a cop with a dog's head, doing their best anyway.
Related: Have Kids Crazy About Dog Man? Here Are Even More Great Books by Dav Pilkey
