Dear Children of the World: If You Swallow a Horse, You Will Die
As many faithful readers already know, I have been recently spending a fair amount of time in the company of small children. And in doing so one trend I have observed an over sanitizing of children's upbringing. The original Megatron toy would never fly today, and children are forbidden from playing favorite games from my childhood like "Commie-Spy Killer" (which admittedly has lost some of its relevance, and no, I didn't grasp what a "Commie" was at the time, but all my hero on TV fought against them and that was good enough for me).
That's all well and good. Those I can handle. But let's all sing this one together: "I know and old woman who swallowed a fly. I don’t know why she swallowed that fly..." If you grew up in my generation, you completed those lyrics with "...perhaps she’ll die," and you know that after swallowing a horse "she died of course." But that's not what today's children are learning.
I think expunging any mention of death from our children's life does them a disservice. Not only does it gloss over the serious danger involved in swallowing horses (though to be fair, I'm not sure how she made it past cat) it also ignores a very real truth:
People die.
No matter how we try to protect him or her, sooner or later somebody the child loves will die. I feel like the only ethical thing to do is to prepare children and help them understand that death is a natural part of existence.
But wait. There's more.
Some of the preschools I visit are explicitly Christian and include "Jesus Time" as part of their curriculum. At one such institution, I was paging through a book of children's prayers when I came upon an old favorite "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep..." Wait a minute... that wasn't what I remembered. What's next, will they tone down David and Goliath?
Of course that's exactly what they did. I'd like to make one thing perfectly clear incase any children are reading this: David killed Goliath. Between when Goliath "fell with a loud thud right on his face" and when the Philistines "ran away and David became a hero," David "took hold of the Philistine's sword and drew it from the scabbard. After he killed [Goliath], he cut off his head with the sword." (And on a minor note, there is a difference between a sling and a slingshot).
I haven't been at any preschool, let alone a Christian on, around Easter, but this trend makes me wonder how they'll handle that holiday. How do you teach resurrection without teaching death?
