I’m also in the in-between, in that I’m for leaving the books as written, while offering young readers a little help with reading between the lines. My kids are older now, and I don’t think we read Dahl together, but if we had, I would have been *that mom* who paused while reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to editorialize about Gloop and his fate, to ask leading questions about what his character suggests about the morality of fatness, and how these views are still around, even though they’re a bunch of junk.
And my kids would have been super annoyed and wanted me to get on with the story...because it’s a great story, and that’s important, too. If it wasn’t, we could just quietly let it go out of print, right?
Yes, I think as parents we can "educate" as we read, but for independent readers, maybe the "adapted" versions will be helpful. Interestingly, when I asked my 16 year old's opinion, they (and their friends) felt the books should be changed as they felt they were offensive and out of date.
That’s so interesting! I must admit, as a bookish mom, I was much more quick to criticize more contemporary kids books that came into our house, and to quietly get rid of subpar titles, in favour of something I liked better, both in terms of the writing/values in the content, but I had much more complex feelings about the classics, especially ones I loved as a kid…and now I basically have no say over what they read, so I just have to trust them/trust I did an okay job...
I guess we all have our own biases and I just revealed a pile of mine lol
I think if you raise kids to have a love of books and to be independent readers, you've done a great job already! Both my kids have completely different reading tastes, but they both still read lots, so I'm happy haha (they are 23 and 16, so don't think they'll grow out of it now ; )
This is so interesting. I hadn’t heard about the Dahl controversies. It seems silly to me to change literature -- old books are snapshots in time and they allow us to go back and learn what things were like then. It doesn’t feel right to change it. Also, I also loved The Awakening!!!!
I’m also in the in-between, in that I’m for leaving the books as written, while offering young readers a little help with reading between the lines. My kids are older now, and I don’t think we read Dahl together, but if we had, I would have been *that mom* who paused while reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to editorialize about Gloop and his fate, to ask leading questions about what his character suggests about the morality of fatness, and how these views are still around, even though they’re a bunch of junk.
And my kids would have been super annoyed and wanted me to get on with the story...because it’s a great story, and that’s important, too. If it wasn’t, we could just quietly let it go out of print, right?
Yes, I think as parents we can "educate" as we read, but for independent readers, maybe the "adapted" versions will be helpful. Interestingly, when I asked my 16 year old's opinion, they (and their friends) felt the books should be changed as they felt they were offensive and out of date.
That’s so interesting! I must admit, as a bookish mom, I was much more quick to criticize more contemporary kids books that came into our house, and to quietly get rid of subpar titles, in favour of something I liked better, both in terms of the writing/values in the content, but I had much more complex feelings about the classics, especially ones I loved as a kid…and now I basically have no say over what they read, so I just have to trust them/trust I did an okay job...
I guess we all have our own biases and I just revealed a pile of mine lol
I think if you raise kids to have a love of books and to be independent readers, you've done a great job already! Both my kids have completely different reading tastes, but they both still read lots, so I'm happy haha (they are 23 and 16, so don't think they'll grow out of it now ; )
This is so interesting. I hadn’t heard about the Dahl controversies. It seems silly to me to change literature -- old books are snapshots in time and they allow us to go back and learn what things were like then. It doesn’t feel right to change it. Also, I also loved The Awakening!!!!
Thanks Brooke! It's a tricky topic, for sure. I find myself wavering somewhere inbetween.
The Awakening was my favourite classic when studying English Lit!!