Green Oasis

Our oldest daughter asks us to tell her a story as part of our bedtime ritual. Last night, she wanted to tell me a story after I finished telling mine. She and I collaborate on our stories. I pause at certain points and ask her what a character should say or who they meet and so on. She asked me who I wanted the main character of her story to be. I thought it would be fun to hear a story about a crocodile.

The very first thing my precious little girl had the crocodile do is eat a baby! I stifled an involuntary chuckle at this unexpectedly violent plot twist so early in the story. My daughter went on to tell a gruesome tale (which would surely make international headlines if it were true) of this crocodile hunting and eating baby after baby after baby. I lost count of the babies who ended up down his gullet. The crocodile apparently didn’t like the taste of diapers so it looked for naked babies. It also preferred dead babies. Luckily for him, he found one in a trash can. With each baby ingested, the crocodile got bigger and bigger until finally fell over in torpid, satisfied exhaustion. The story ended with the crocodile playing with a ball as if this was just another day.

I wasn’t horrified so much as shocked that my four-year-old child had come up with such a cruel story. In trying to find the seeds of this story, I’ve thought of two candidates: the story of Abiyoyo, a giant who eats people, and Spirited Away where one character swallows other characters and gets bigger and bigger.

Some parents would reflexively ban these stories from their household. They obviously taught my daughter violence. Instead it made me think about the horrifying things that happen in fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother swallowed whole by a wolf, the eyes of Cinderella’s stepsisters pecked out by birds, Snow White’s stepmother forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes at her daughter’s wedding until she dies. These brutal tales were the stuff of childhood not so long ago.

Is the lack of violence in our modern children’s stories a sign of our enlightenment or of our separation from the brutal facts of reality? Life is an act of violence. Each living thing exists at the expense of some other living thing. Each life ends in death.

Yet we try our best to hide from these facts. Gone are the days when we slaughtered our own animals, or sat with the corpse of our recently dead in our own homes. The violence that we see in our entertainment is idealized, pornographic violence. The problem with what we watch isn’t that it is too realistic, but that it isn’t real enough. It obfuscates the realities of death so that it can be more appetizing and entertaining to our paradoxically effete yet brutal tastes.

Are we doing our children a favor by isolating them from death and violence, and therefore from life? Obviously overexposure would also be bad, but there must be some middle ground where children can come to terms with death and violence from the safety of their beds under the supervision of loving parents. It seems that children are more prepared to deal with death than we may imagine.