[dmlorenzetti]

For terribly depressing books aimed at kids even younger than grade school, check out the Thomas the Tank Engine series.

The basic lesson is that any deviation from the rules will be punished severely. One of the trains likes flowers so he leaves the tracks to smell them. Punishment: the entire village jumps out of the field to scare him. Another train gets vain about his new paint job. Punishment: he is bricked into a tunnel for a year, until he rusts. Oddly, little kids eat this stuff up.

I don't know if it's blind allegiance to trains, or if they really like the moral world portrayed.

[jonny_noog]

That's both amusing and concerning at the same time. I have always felt a little unsettled when I have happened to watch Thomas the Tank Engine, both as a child and as an adult.

There does seem to be something of a history of rather severe children's tales. Look at Roald Dahl or the Brothers Grimm. Not that I'm directly equating Roald Dahl or the Brothers Grimm (whom I generally like) to Thomas and friends (whom I generally do not like) but there does seem to be some strand of commonality in terms of the extremes of the underlying messages in long surviving children's tales, even if the lesson/message is not necessarily pointing in the same direction in all cases.

A little severity in ones entertainment as a child is a good thing in my mind (though lessons enforcing conformity do not fall into this "good" kind of severity for me). I remember watching Star Wars as a young child and being freaked out by that scene in the bar where Ben Kenobi cuts the alien's arm off with his light sabre. But it was moments like that which made the movie memorable to me, gave it impact and helped to make it more than just a series of movies, it became it's own mythology in my mind.

Conversely, I believe the lack of this was primarily what made the new Star Wars films crap by comparison. With the new movies, they made the mistake of trying to make them "kid safe" and easily digestible to as wide an audience as possible. In doing so, they ruined any chance of a new generation having a similar experience with the new movies as I did with the old, and of the the new films ever having any true soul.

[ars]

I have a book called "The Rainbow Fish", which I refuse to let my kids read.

I think it has a horrible message, that individuality is bad, and you must give away all that is special about you in order to conform.

I never bothered to look it up till today, and I see that wikipedia has an http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_Fish about it, with almost exactly the same criticism I made.

Why do adults write such books (including the ones you mentioned) for kids? And why do other adults allow them to become popular (AKA buy them)?

[tptacek]

Dude, The Rainbow Fish is just a book about sharing. You know, like stickers and crayons and stuff.

I'm pretty sure we can take any children's book and, with some rhetorical gymnastics, reconstruct Harrison Bergeron from them.

[ars]

I can see how you can read it that way. But the fish has to give away parts of it's own body! And not just that, but give away the very thing that makes it special.

And it's not like sharing one crayon when you have a box of them, no, here it has to give away every single one of it's scales until every fish has exactly the same amount.

To put it in human terms, it's like if a girl in class has long pretty hair, and all the other girls are jealous, so they make her cut off pieces of it to give to all the other girls.

Or in less dramatic terms, if I have a box of crayons, I don't just share one with the kid next to me, I go around the class and hand one out to each and every kid, until every kid has exactly the same number of crayons.

I also don't like the message from the friends, who insist on receiving the item. Sharing is about giving, it is NOT about demanding that the other person share with you. (Or snubbing them until they give you want you want.)

[tptacek]

The friends don't insist on receiving the scales. The friends are annoyed when the Rainbow Fish uses them as a reason he's better than they are. Which is exactly what little kids do when they get some awesome toy or a neat set of markers: show them off, and refuse to share.

[ars]

Then the message should be about not showing off, rather than give it all away.

[ahoyhere]

A Separate Peace. Oops, I'm the charity case and I accidentally pushed you, Rich Boy, out of a tree! And then you were crippled! AND THEN YOU DIED!

Watership Down. Three words: creepy rabbit ghosts.

Old Yeller. To Kill a Mockingbird.

And on and on and on... apparently the way to become respected, Serious Literature for children is to kill people. Or at least characters in your book.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathByNewberyMed...

This list seriously made me smile but yes, I agree, not HN.