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][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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. [/quote]

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. [/quote]

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,[/quote]

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.[/quote]

So I'm the one who said Blubber made me want to experiment with mean behavior. My parents would have been 100% mortified if they had known about this. I attended church from an early age, knew the golden rule, was kind to others naturally, etc. And I feel like normally I would agree with you that most "mean girl" issues are parenting issues of not teaching your kid empathy/compassion for others, etc. But this wasn't the case for me. I felt empathy and compassion and was never the mean girl. And I definitely knew what my parents expected about being kind to others.

But something about that book made me identify with the main character, who, as I recall, is basically a normal and generally nice girl, Jill...who is good friends with two girls who inexplicably start picking on the fat girl in class after she gives a report on Whales. And Jill doesn't really want to be mean, but she doesn't exactly defend the girl either, mostly because she is not the queen bee and she doesn't want to upset the queen bee...but eventually she reluctantly joins in. But then she does something that makes her fall out of grace with the two friends and suddenly Jill is the one who is picked on...and the fat girl is now part of the popular mean girl group that joins in on picking on Jill too!
During my reading of the book when I was a kid, I think somehow I got the wrong message out of it at first and, to my 11-year-old mind was "it's an victimize or BE victimized" world! And I didn't want to be the victim...so I thought it would be better to victimize, even though I knew it was wrong. I even felt it as I was [i]doing[/i] it, which is sort of psychopathic. And probably why I apologized even before getting off the bus. But I definitely DID it. And I guarantee you that, for me, this bizarre idea came directly from my reading this book and thinking I had probably get more aggressive and mean or I might end up like Jill with people being mean to ME. (Even though...at the end of the book, I think things end up "okay" again)
In fact, the message was supposed to be that Jill should have stood up for what she knew was right to begin with...then she never would have become the victim. But somehow that went over the head of my feeble mind at the time!
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