Comment by gls2ro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gls2ro | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how to think about this:

On one side, it might be nice to create stories that fit a specific want/desire for what a child might need. We might even go for the concept of a segment of one kind of story.

On the other hand, I am picky with the stories I read to my child. I see stories I read as education. They transmit some non-conscious cultural things about being human, about handling this reality and the world.

For me the books I read to my kid are the future equivalent of people telling stories around the fire to transmit some necessary and vital knowledge thousands of years ago. I believe (without a scientific ) they are shaping both my child how my child sees the world (through words construct and imagination) and my child value system.

Of course, I am trying to expose him to various stories and books as I am also not sure what I think is important is actually important for his life.

But I am a bit reluctant/skeptical whenever I buy a book launched recently. I am not 100% sure if the author just wrote a story because they want to sell something, and it does not have any other meaning. Don't get me wrong, it is ok to just buy a book because it looks nice, even if it is shallow. But there are so many books that I don't want all the books to be the same.

> But I am a bit reluctant/skeptical whenever I buy a book launched recently. I am not 100% sure if the author just wrote a story because they want to sell something, and it does not have any other meaning.

I understand your concern. But in this case the whole "book" is just a few pages long. You can vet the thing in minutes.

It is a lot harder with longer books. I remember vividly an instance from my childhood a case where my mom was reading us a Doctor Dolittle book. I remember it, because in the middle of the book they had a fight with a crocodile who tried to eat the hero, and according to the story they bound the crocodile and gagged it and left it for good. And as a child I felt so sorry for the crocodile who just followed its natural instinct, and now bound and gagged he will surely die a slow and painful death. My mom seeing that this made me upset she turned the page back and decided to improvise a story pretending as if she was reading from the page. In the new revised story they made the crock promise them not to eat them, and then they untied him.

And that was a book published half a century before us reading it. So recency is not necessarily a safeguard.

Also sometimes the chat you have with your kid about a story is as important as the story itself. For example about this linked one I would ask any kids if they also found it odd that the hedgehog gave up their passion of baking and opened a theme park. That can lead to deep conversations about the purposes of life, or maybe a much shallower but equally delightful one about the fun of theme parks.

Absolutely, there's always a moral to a story in any well-known children book. As for trusting the old, well-tested stories more, I agree, we all grew up on them, but they also hold a darker side as many of the classics also hide a lot of subtle old days social and gender stereotypes and references, as well as many hidden sexual allegories that I personally don't really want my kids to buy into - from banal ones like portraying aristocrats as superior, to the really foobar ones with all these passive princesses just sitting and waiting for that one prince charming to come and rescue them. Hats off to the new wave of fairytales (like e.g. Shrek) that are now trying to move away from all these stereotypes.

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