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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Well, I wouldn't say I LOVED it, but I truly hate the message in The Giving Tree.  [/quote]

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.

[/quote]

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).[/quote]

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