Secretly Sinister

Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop,
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock;
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

This seems innocent enough until you actually think about what it is saying. Imagine with me:

A new mother takes her little baby, puts it into a cradle, climbs up a tree, and leaves baby in the branches. Perhaps it is a poplar. That would probably be enough to have Mom arrested. But if that wasn’t enough, then the wind starts to blow and it becomes obvious that the poplar will not be supporting baby for long. It’s ok, though, because that is always what Mom intended. It’s not “if the bough breaks,” it’s “when the bough breaks.” This was premeditated. Good ole Mom might have a bit of a mean streak after all. So the wind blows, the bough breaks, and baby and cradle plummet down from the tree to an untimely end.

We often overlook the content of rhymes that have been passed down for centuries simply because they are old. In France (and in high school French classes around the world), children learn a song “Alouette” or “Lark” which goes as follows:

Lark, nice lark,
Lark, I will pluck your feathers!
I will pluck your head,
Your head, your head
Ooooh!

After the first verse, the child continues plucking other parts of the bird, including the nose, the eyes, the neck, the wings, the back, the legs, and the tail. And I must point out that not all of those locations even have feathers on them. In order to pluck the nose, eyes, and legs of a bird, one must be plucking something other than feathers. Ghastly!

While not all nursery rhymes are violent in subject matter, it is so common that explanations now often gravitate toward the violent naturally. Most people have heard that “Ring Around a Rosy” depicts the symptoms and demise of victims of the bubonic plague, though most scholars think the theory is untenable. But even were it true, no one would have qualms about singing it with children.

I’ve always wondered why moms don’t seem to realize what they are saying to their kids in these rhymes. Many moms are perfectly willing to feed their children gruesome tales in the cradle but become absolutely furious when Johnny goes to school and hears a fairy tale that includes a big, bad monster. “He was so scared by that wolf! I can’t believe you would read those kids such a terrible story!”

Little does the mother know that “Little Red Riding Hood” originally ended with the death of the girl, munched up by the wolf just like the grandmother – no woodcutter to save the day, no happy ending, just grim, gruesome death, except for the wolf of course. I wonder how Mom would have reacted if Johnny had heard that version of the story instead of the tame modern one.

While nursery rhymes have maintained their sometimes violent content, we have felt the need over the years to make children’s stories nicer, happier. The original stories were intended to teach lessons, not just to entertain. So if they were good enough for children a few hundred years ago, why are they too scary for kids these days? I don’t think they are. In my opinion, our sanitization of stories, and life in general, makes children believe that everything ends well, that there is always a woodcutter to save the day or a Prince Charming for every Princess. But life is not always happy; in fact, for much of the world, life is more often sad. I have nothing against happy stories, but I do have something against only happy stories.

Learning to deal with the big, bad monster is a vital part of childhood, a precursor to dealing with the real monsters of the world: poverty, murder, disease, hatred. Obviously balance is needed. I would not want my children to be constantly afraid of the strange denizens of the nighttime closet, but I also would not want my children to arrive at adulthood without ever encountering the harsh realities of the world.

The problems of today’s world are the same as they have always been, though manifested differently and with the possibility of greater destruction due to nuclear weapons and other technology. So I have come up with new nursery rhyme fraught with doom for the next generation of kids. Perhaps in fifty years when the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood” doesn’t even manage to eat the grandmother, the nursery rhymes will still survive with a needed dose of reality:

Daisy, daisy in field of green,
Hazy, hazy clouds over me,
Mushrooms grow and daisies fall;
That will be the end of all.