If it's emotionally scarring, it must be authentic.

So, as a follow-up to yesterday's post on emotionally-manipulative children's stories, let's move on to why people think children ought to read about dying children or spiders or burned and neglected toys.  Well, to prepare them for real life, of course.  They need to know about the heartlessness of people and the unfairness of the world because ... because why, exactly?  On the occasion of the recent royal wedding, one blogger wrote about how she planned to use the occasion to tell her six-year-old (six!) about how difficult marriage is and how there are no happily-ever-afters in real life.  Really?  You want to pop her birthday balloon and drop her ice cream on the sidewalk, too?  Is it so awful that children grow up believing in goodness and happiness?  Do we have to impress cynicism on them at such a young age?  Will they not discover for themselves as they grow that things don't always work out the way they would like, so that adults have to implant doubts and distrust so that they live their lives always waiting for the other shoe to drop? 

I'm not convinced that all the tragic endings I was subjected to as I was growing up are necessarily any more "authentic" than the happy ones, anyway.  There's a whole genre of kids-who-have-to-kill-their-beloved-pets literature (Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller, The Yearling, etc.).  How many people out there have ever actually had to shoot their own pet?  Show of hands, people!  C'mon, don't be shy! 

I can't tell you how many disturbing scenes that I wish I could unread were imposed on me by assigned reading throughout my school years.  For sheer gruesomeness, the detailed and explicitly described depiction of a woman getting a nose job in V; for sheer depravity, the kitten-hanging chapter in Black Boy.  But there was one short story I had to read in middle school which has haunted me for years.  I don't remember the name of the story or the author, but it was about a colt that was born with twisted legs that a child kept as a pet.  The child's father (Does anyone in literature have a kind, loving father?  Scout Finch, I guess.) insists that the only thing to be done with the animal is to sell it for meat and hide, but the child insists on taking care of it and buys braces to put on its legs so it can walk around.  Eventually, the child comes home from school to find the horse gone, and the father says he sent it to a nice farm or pasture out in the country where it will be happy.  The story ends with the family in the car driving to go get ice cream or something, and they pass the slaughterhouse.  Outside by the road lies the flayed corpse of the child's horse, the braces still on its legs.

Really, school?  Really?  Thank you for that image which I will never escape....