When Do We Let Kids Read About Really Bad Things
Too young for Holocaust lit?
Growing up in a tight knit Jewish community in the 1970s, I wasn’t told about the Holocaust on any particular day. It was just something I knew about. There were people I knew who’d been there. When I was little, I didn’t know exactly where there was, but as I got older, I found out. As I did, I read Holocaust novels. There are a lot of kids books about the Holocaust and I read as many as I could. I must have been at least 8 when I started in on those titles, but for me, the stories colored in between the lines I already knew were on the page. When my kids start reading books about the Holocaust, it won’t be so familiar to them. It’ll be new information, and it will be scary.
This is the problem Ruth Franklin grapples with in a recent essay in The New Republic. Franklin, who wrote a book about literature and the Holocaust, had to decide what to tell her 5 and 7-year old about her book and what kids books about the Holocaust, if any, she might show them. This problem is one we face over and over again as parents. How do we tell our kids about terrible things people do to one another?
It’s not as though they’re completely sheltered from the really bad news. Any fairy tale, even Disney versions, include abduction, death threats, being shut away in attics. The Grimm Fairy Tales are notorious for their grimness, but those terrible stories have a fairy, or a witch, or an elf, or something to signal ‘this is pretend so it might get really gruesome, but you’ll know it’s pretend.’ With the Holocaust, there’s no such out. Children will read stories of people who survived terrible trials, horrible losses and they’ll know they’re real.
Then again, what’s real? As much as I knew about the Holocaust as a child, I didn’t really understand it. When our kids were just 4 they saw a painting of the rubble of 9/11 in a diner. There were firemen in the picture. My son was obsessed with firemen. They asked what had happened, we told them some 9 11 facts. The next week my son showed the picture to my sister-in-law. “A lot of people died,” he told her.
“Yes,” she said.
“And they were all wearing underpants!”
Holocaust novels, stories of children of the holocaust, these gripped me as a child because they made me cry and they scared me and terror and horror are useful emotions when it comes to confronting death. When my kids read them, they’ll probably experience some of the same feelings. But that won’t be for a while.
Ruth Franklin ultimately decides her kids are too young to start reading holocaust books. She writes:
A story in which a young girl is separated from her parents and sent to an unknown destination, or another little girl comments casually that her older sister is “all that is left of our family,” is obviously unsuitable bedtime reading for little kids with active imaginations and a fear of the dark.
Franklin has a point. Reading is an intimate act, even for young children. Words nestle into their brains, images hang around, we have to consider all this carefully when we choose books for children. But eventually, we have to take the plunge and let them read. Bad stuff happens, and sometimes amazing stories of love and survival result.
What do you think? How do you talk about terrible events with your kids? When would you let them read Holocaust novels?
More on Strollerderby
A Pet for Christmas? That’ll Cost You
Parenting, Perfection and the Problem of Kids
For Oral Contraceptives, No Exam Necessary
Ten Minute Breaks Mean Healthy Habits for Grown Ups and Kids
Thanksgiving Means My First Sort of Pumpkin Pie
A Holiday Diet for Digital Devices and Developing Minds
War Games in Korea: Good Guys and Bad Guys
How Old is Too Old to Have a Child?
Do Braces Make Sense for Little Kids?
Books for Children, Perfect Holiday Gifts
Do Celebrity Moms Make the Rest of Us Want to Lose Weight Fast?
Very timely post, as I attended a meeting last night to help plan my synagogue’s annual Yom Hashoah event. As a third generation survivor, I think a lot about how to transmit the legacy to my 6 and 2 year old children. My grandfather passed away last spring, but the 6yo already knew he had been in a war and that people tried to kill him, and that we’re very lucky to have him in our lives. She knows there are bad people out there, has been involved with conversations on why mommy is sad on 9/11, but you’re right, they’re guarded conversations. But in another year or two, when she is reading more competently on her own, I will let her read the books. I did – I remember arguing to do a book report on one of them as a fifth grader. The legacy of the Holocaust has had a huge impact on my life, its shadow touches so many of my decisions and actions, and I would be doing my children a disservice to shield them from it.
I struggle with these ideas a lot. I don’t want to strip my kids of their innocence too soon, and nothing does that faster than learning about horrors like the Holocaust. I just read about Unit 731 for the first time the other day and it gave me nightmares. Never is too soon for my kids to hear about that. So I just don’t know.
I am not Jewish, but I grew up in Yugoslavia, and while attending school in the early 70s, we studied the WWII in details. Many Serbs shared their Jewish neighbors’ fate, ending up mostly in Dachau and Mauthausen, or in Croatian concentration camp in Jasenovac. Our field trips were often organized to visit one of the sites of mass shootings (Germans had issued a rule: for 1 dead German, 100 dead Serbs; for 1 wounded German, 50 dead Serbs). My grandfather, the priest, was shot as a hostage when my father was seven, and buried in a mass grave.
I was a voracious reader and there were many books set in WWII that I just could not stop reading.
My children were born in the U.S., and my husband is an American. I know how little they study in school about WWII (I guess it depends on the teacher), so I give them small history lessons now and then.
My 12 year old is as obsessed with the Holocaust books as I was at her age (getting ready to read “Schindler’s List”), and she started reading about WWII several years ago). One of her favorite movies is “The Boy in Striped Pajamas”, and she shared it with some of her friends recently, trying to get them interested in her world. She is extremely sensitive and loves history. But I spend a lot of time talking to her and explaining things, trying to teach her that there are bad people and good people in any nation, in any religion, in any color. I like to lead my kids into new things little by little, with a lot of help and supervision. Reading about “bad people” at an early age did not desensitize nor traumatize me, and I am hoping for the same for my kids.
Sorry for the rant:)
I don’t think kids are “traumatized” by reading about the Holocaust, but when it’s a little more removed, and the stories are real, I think you have to go step by step and kid by kid. At 12 your child is older and ready to tackle really complicated ideas. My kids are 6 and can be very frightened in the dark, and so, I’ll wait for them to get a little older before these books start being in their library.
I’m not sure which comes first, the fear or the fascination. I read a lot of “scary” books when I was young, I believe it started around 8. Throughout later Elementary and Jr. High my books of choice were the Lurlean McDaniel books about people dying from various fatal and horrific illnesses. I had (have) a lot of trouble with unfounded fears and risk aversion, but I can’t answer whether they were causes/fed by the books I read or whether I was attracted to these books because they appealed to my already darker instincts.