Books You Loved as a Child But Don't Want for Your Kids

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What about Superfudge by Judy Blume? I won't give it to my daughter bc it has a Santa reveal (she's a rising 3rd grader).

I hadn't remembered this and was reading it ALOUD to my kids....and then suddenly stopped...skipped over it! PHEW!!!

I had it on audiobook for my rising 1st grader. Whoops. Now he's pretty sure that there's no Santa.

[Anonymous]

Little Match Girl-

I had no idea it was a real story BUT the Olivia Ballerina pig books? They reference it and it's "so so sad!" .... So my daughters (3 & 4) are always asking about it.

[Anonymous]

Bluebeard. I was afraid of this story. It’s scary even for an adult, with a room full of blood and the bodies of his ex-wives.

Another fairy tale where someone kills his own kids with a sword while they’re asleep, and it’s all because someone switched hats with them. Does anyone remember the name of this one?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Well, I wouldn't say I LOVED it, but I truly hate the message in The Giving Tree.

I feel like this is a book that people read 2 ways. Is the message "Be the tree"? Because that's an awful message. But, I know for me the first time I read it I thought the message was "don't let people use you." That's a message I can get behind.

For me, I feel like I still read a lot of the classic literature, but when there was a problem we read the book together, and we talked about it. It was a chance to clarify my family values. So, we talked about Ping getting hit, and about Curious George smoking, and about the portrayal of Native Americans in Little House in the Prairie, and about Babar and colonialism, but we still read them. We even read Twilight together when my kid asked, and I think that book is crazy creepy and stalkerish. We just talked about how not to be stalkerish.

Some of this is about reading books at the age when they're written for, or a little later. I know many parents who are very proud of the fact that their kid does things early, which can sometimes lead to kids not evaluating what they read. It's great that your four year old can sound out all the words in Little House on the Prairie, but they probably can't understand the context of one group pushing another group off their land. So, that's a book I'd put off a little. But it's also a classic, and something I want my kids to know about to culturally literate.

[Anonymous]

Most of Andersen’s stories are sad/somber. Consider the real “Little Mermaid” - very different ending than in the Disney version. His stories are often considered fairy tales, but as a PP noted they weren’t meant for children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Most of Andersen’s stories are sad/somber. Consider the real “Little Mermaid” - very different ending than in the Disney version. His stories are often considered fairy tales, but as a PP noted they weren’t meant for children.

Must everything be safe and sanitized for kids? I mean Disney gets tons of flack for scrubbing the nuance and darkness out of the original stories.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of Andersen’s stories are sad/somber. Consider the real “Little Mermaid” - very different ending than in the Disney version. His stories are often considered fairy tales, but as a PP noted they weren’t meant for children.

Must everything be safe and sanitized for kids? I mean Disney gets tons of flack for scrubbing the nuance and darkness out of the original stories.

A lot of the original stories were very gruesome.

I don't know about you, but I am perfectly fine with the average 4 year old thinking Cinderella is all about sewing mice, sparkly dresses, pumpkin coaches and fairy godmothers, rather than watching an animated illustration of one girl cutting off her toes and another girl cutting off her heel to try to squeeze her bloody foot into a shoe to catchba prince.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I reread some of those Judy Blume books as an adult. I'm convinced they're why I became kind of a a mean girl in 6th and 7th grade. I always rooted for the underdogs in those books, but at the end time I think they normalized mean girl behavior enough in my young mind that I became one myself. I don't know. I was a dummy.

OMG Same! I was just telling me DS and DD about this like two days ago. BLUBBER was the worst and totally remember "experimenting" on the bus to see if I could BE that mean. (I could. And then I felt very sorry for it afterward and apologized to the crying girl before we got off the bus.) Just awful. I was in 5th grade.

Wow, this is really interesting, tell me more about this? I didn’t find it that way at all and still don’t. I may have to remov th books from my daughters room,

I didn't find these books to influence me in a negative way, either (I have no recollection of Deenie beyond the back brace.) I don't buy that the books create mean girls, but might normalize the behavior although that's a parenting issue.

I don't agree with that.

Most mean girls are created by friends and hormones, or sometimes contensious divorces, not moms.

I went through an awful mean girl minnion phase in 5th-6th grade.

My mom had nothing to do with it.

She was the kindest, gentlest, strong yet meek, inclusive, fun, loving person I have ever met. She would have been horrified if she had even an inkling of any of the mean stuff I was part of.

And I don't agree with the above.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of Andersen’s stories are sad/somber. Consider the real “Little Mermaid” - very different ending than in the Disney version. His stories are often considered fairy tales, but as a PP noted they weren’t meant for children.

Must everything be safe and sanitized for kids? I mean Disney gets tons of flack for scrubbing the nuance and darkness out of the original stories.

A lot of the original stories were very gruesome.

I don't know about you, but I am perfectly fine with the average 4 year old thinking Cinderella is all about sewing mice, sparkly dresses, pumpkin coaches and fairy godmothers, rather than watching an animated illustration of one girl cutting off her toes and another girl cutting off her heel to try to squeeze her bloody foot into a shoe to catchba prince.

Kid is a wide age range. At what point is the original ok?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tikki tikki Tembo. Totally racist

I haven’t read this since I was a kid- what is wrong with it?

Basically it's a story to "explain" why Chinese kids now have monosyllabic names like "Chang" because the kid who had the long name ("Tikki Tikki Tembo No Sa Rembo Pep Beri Puchi Peri Peri Pembo"--or something crazy long and nonsensical, but fun for kids to try to memorize b/c it repeats throughout the story,,,which is basically why kids liked it!) fell into a well and the brother who tried to go get help took too long because he kept having to get through saying his name to try to get someone to come and save him.

And at the end of the book it's like "so this is why Chinese kids have short names" as like the moral of the story. (Probably whoever wrote it wasn't trying to be racist. It just as easily could have been a stupid story that ended with "and that's why tigers have stripes"--but that wouldn't go along with the name thing and making it repetitive and all that.) In the end, it just comes off sounding super racist.

I guess to some people. To me, it reads like a folk tale, which, like most folk tales, is nonsensical and very appealing to young children. (And, in fact, Tikki Tikki Tembo it is a retelling of an old story, although the origins of the story are unclear.)

Stories about why tigers have stripes are not "stupid" stories. They are the stories humans have told throughout history.

My kids LOVED the book Tikki Tikki Tembo. They are teens now, and they don't think Chinese naming customs center around the experiences of a boy who fell down a well any more than they think that tigers got their stripes because somebody spilled paint on them (though we read stories like that when they were little, too).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Well, I wouldn't say I LOVED it, but I truly hate the message in The Giving Tree.

I feel like this is a book that people read 2 ways. Is the message "Be the tree"? Because that's an awful message. But, I know for me the first time I read it I thought the message was "don't let people use you." That's a message I can get behind.

For me, I feel like I still read a lot of the classic literature, but when there was a problem we read the book together, and we talked about it. It was a chance to clarify my family values. So, we talked about Ping getting hit, and about Curious George smoking, and about the portrayal of Native Americans in Little House in the Prairie, and about Babar and colonialism, but we still read them. We even read Twilight together when my kid asked, and I think that book is crazy creepy and stalkerish. We just talked about how not to be stalkerish.

Some of this is about reading books at the age when they're written for, or a little later. I know many parents who are very proud of the fact that their kid does things early, which can sometimes lead to kids not evaluating what they read. It's great that your four year old can sound out all the words in Little House on the Prairie, but they probably can't understand the context of one group pushing another group off their land. So, that's a book I'd put off a little. But it's also a classic, and something I want my kids to know about to culturally literate.

I could not agree more with this. And I will add that books can be enjoyed in different ways at different ages. I read Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie to my DS when he was 4, and I edited out the negative stuff about Indians and we just enjoyed it for its descriptions of a little girl's life in the woods and on the prairie. He LOVED them. And then I read the whole series aloud to him when he was in 3rd and 4th grade, with no editing at all, which gave us a great opportunity to discuss the treatment of Indians and racism in general, and many other topics. This is why I am a big believer in reading aloud to children well into middle school (and even longer).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What about Superfudge by Judy Blume? I won't give it to my daughter bc it has a Santa reveal (she's a rising 3rd grader).

I think a rising 3rd grader is plenty old enough to figure out Santa isn't real... don't most kids figure it out by 6 or so?

No.

Yes, you're wrong. Sorry...

NP. I’ve seen kids play along with the Santa myth all through elementary school but I’m not buying that there are that many 8year olds who still believe in Santa. The kid would have to be sheltered to an extreme, no school, no peers, limited exposure to movies/TV, etc.

I suppose it’s possible, but not realistic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The little match girl - I LOVED it. An orphan survives by selling matches on the street corner. On Christmas Eve she’s very cold in a blizzard and sees a family in their home all warm and happy. They welcome her in and she gets to enjoy this beautiful family scene. Except she didn’t really, that was a hallucination from hypothermia and she’s dead found dead on the street corner in the snow on Xmas morning.

I'd 100% forgotten about this book! Blocked from my memory, clearly. I remember crying so hard at the end.

[Anonymous]

LOL at the nitwits all spun up about the "racism" in Little House in the Big Woods and Little House on the Prairie.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I loved Deanie when I was 10 but reread it recently and am so glad I did! I returned it to the library before my daughter could read it. Maybe now that she’s 14, and if she found it on her own, but I wouldn’t want her to tell people, “My mom told me to read this book about a girl with scoliosis who likes to masterbate.”
Oh - and I read “Clan if the Cave Bear” series when I was about 14. Yikes.

I was so young when I read this- maybe 10- that I didn't get that she was masturbating. It talked about Deenie feeling better and more relaxed when she touched her 'special place' and I was like ME TOO! because I used to pet/tickle my upper back when I was falling asleep. I reread it years later and was like hmmmm

But I did like the scoliosis description because it opened up my mind at a young age to what it's like to have to deal with physical discomfort or weird family dynamics (her mother was such a stage mom/b!tch- I remember she didn't like her wearing running shoes because she thought it made your feet 'spread' and she wanted her to be a skinny model). I liked peeking in at someone else's life like that and being thankful for what I had.