Children's Books Don't Age Well, or, It's My Own Damn Fault My Toddler Is Now Fascinated With Guns

[dr_pretentious]

We've been digging through the attic, both to find the things we'll need when the new baby comes and to make the attic itself more habitable for my helpful cousin Ian. I found a box of my favorite picture books from when I was a kid in the 1970's, and oh my, people had some different ideas then about what was appropriate for young children to read about.

I remembered loving the wacky etiquette advice in Sesyle Joslin and Maurice Sendak's What Do You Say, Dear? Actually, the etiquette advice itself is sound enough, but example situations are full of crashing airplanes, decapitated dragons, and orchestras of ravenous bears.

On Gareth's favorite page, the villainous cowboy Bad Nose Bill snarls this offer: "Would you like me to shoot a hole in your head?"

What do you say, dear? Why, you say, "No, thank you." In Sendak's illustrations, Bad Nose Bill is so startled by the politeness of the refusal that the offer appears to be withdrawn.

Rather than learn to respond to offers he'd like to decline with a courteous "No, thank you," Gareth has learned from this page to imagine that gun-shaped things are guns, and that he is Bad Nose Bill. "I am being bad with a gun!" he declares proudly.

In two weeks, he'll go for the first time to the local Unitarian Church's Montessori preschool, the one with the peace pole in the children's butterfly garden. All the other parents, who've been sending their kids there since the kids were in the newborns' daycare room, will faint with horror at my formerly gentle son as he brandishes all those Montessori toys menacingly and offers to shoot holes in people's heads.

What do you say, dear?

"May peace prevail on Earth."

Comments

[spindlewand.livejournal.com]

You know, when I was living through them I never thought I would miss the 70's, but I am find that I am. *sighs* I must say that I don't think it's the kids who are read etiquette poetry of any kind who become more likely to shoot people in the head. It is, after all, being sold as something to decline. No, I am afraid the real shooting in the head influences have little to do with humorous dragons.

I would not be surprised if some of the greatest outward "peace mongers" are not the most brutal, verbally or otherwise, when they think no one is looking. Things just tend to be that way, don't they? Like all the highly upright, moral, conservative Congressmen who keep getting caught, to put it politely, with their toys where, at least by their own professed standards, they do not belong???

My comments, however, may be entirely worthless. I have a five year old who, when tired, head butts like a billy goat. I never taught him that, but I am sure it can be traced to me, somehow... And of course, if we ever find out that the common thread in all of the postal employee shootings, School Campus shootings, and other acts of domestic terrorism is that the perps were read this book as a child and committed it to memory, I suppose I will have to recant. Somehow I am not terribly worried about that.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

Seems most kids are interested in things that go BANG!, finding out what hurts, exploring power dynamics, etc. It's when they come up against a whole culture - and a family - that thinks that the best way to demonstrate your coolness/bravery/pragmatism/value in the world is through violence that the problems occur. Sendak strikes me as having a very sensible approach: appeal to kids' natural fascination with Good and Bad and Grossness, and use it to show them how to make good moral decisions.

When I was a kid, I read a lot of stories about children who ran away from home and had adventures, taking on rings of dangerous criminals, spies, etc. I did almost run away from home (I packed my pillowcase and EVERYTHING), but never got further than the front door. My cousin made it to the garden. And my Dad was brought back from the bus stop at the end of their road by his big sister after 5 minutes, desperately hoping no-one would see how relieved he was. Monkey see, monkey do what is in accordance with its parents values as demonstrated by their actual behaviour. Usually.

Gareth is lovely.

[showingup.livejournal.com]

Oh, did I ever tell you that my fascination with vintage books began when I was a child?

Yeah, my parents had fun with a kid who was interested in explaining the nasty ways of killing people she'd read in British and Irish mythology (for some reason I loved Cúchulainn and his Gáe Bulg and the way his skeleton moved round in his skin, one eye bulged, every hair stood on end with a flame issuing from it, and a pillar of black blood spurted from his head. Also the collecting of human heads as trophies) and the horrible punishments in the Anglo-Norman world (cutting off noses and sewing eyes shut were particular favourites).

And when it came to the "nice" "classic" books I devoured? Rife with sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, racism, classism, and utterly appalling, grotesque violence. How I managed to read my way through Dickens, Walter Scott, RL Stephenson, and a host of Victorian to 1950s British lit as a pre-teen without becoming permanently warped is anyone's guess.

Somehow, I became a hippie.