Parenting is harder than you might expect.
There are of course all the anticipated things: bodily fluids, crying, tantrums, boo-boos, teething, biting, food on the floor.
Mental gymnastics and hostage-negotiations come later, over bedtime, baths, clothes, homework, clubs, chores, birthday parties, AND EVEN MORE! YAY!
And then there are the things that are unexpected.
Like how Laura Ingalls Wilder is trying to mess* me up. Now, I understand that little Laura Ingalls was raised in a different time (we’ll call that Era 1) and that her books were published in another time (Era 2) and we live in still another time (Era 3).
However, in my mind, ideal children’s literature–or any literature–can transcend the whole “era” issue. That’s what turns them into classics.
Take E.B. White’s books. He also grew up in Era 1 (or maybe Era 1.5, as compared to Laura Ingalls), but he wrote in Era 2. Even now, in Era 3, it stands up. The language is a little dated, perhaps–I tried to explain to Miss M that while “gay” does, in fact, mean “happy,” now it’s old-fashioned–but the stories of humans interacting with nature, the suffusion of ethics…these messages seem as important now as they did in 1925 or 1955 or 1970.
But I digress. Back to the Little House books. I read Little House in the Big Woods to Miss M, a chapter at a time. She was enthralled, as I had been as a child. (Making candy with snow! Bears in the woods! Corncob dolls!) I personally found it a little boring this go-round; 10 pages of Pa making bullets and loading his rifle was…long to read out loud.
A friend passed down the next few books of the series, and we started Little House on the Prairie the other day. I read two chapters out loud, then got into bed with it to vet the rest. And I was a little horrified by Ma’s blatant racism. “I don’t like Indians.” Having never met an Indian. Of course.
This troubled me to an extreme degree. I mean, this is Ma. The woman gave up her fancy life in Boston to live in a cabin in Wisconsin, where she cleans, cooks, bakes, gardens, sews, and works from sun-up to sun-down every single day. She makes her own everything from scratch. She is superwoman. Then she packs her life into a covered wagon and leaves the small, distant support system she has to go to the middle of nowhere. Literally. (No offense to anyone from Kansas.)
So for Ma to pronounce “I don’t like Indians” and wash her hands of the entire subject makes me a little crazy. I understand that there is historical context, that she’s scared for her life and the lives of her loved ones, that she is perhaps unsure that the Ingalls family is acting correctly when they take the idea of Manifest Destiny literally into their very hands. But none of this is explained. Probably because the book is written from the perspective of a six year old.
But I have my own six year old. And we are trying to figure out how to teach her about race, and not judging people based on how they look or where they come from, or why saying “I don’t like Sephardim” (Jews originally from southern Europe, north Africa or the Middle East) is not a phrase you throw around anywhere but especially in Israel, where there are tons of Sephardim. Issues of race and class have the same prickly feelings here as they do in America.
When Miss M reports that she is just repeating what a friend said, I want to cry. Because wouldn’t the friend, a ditzy six year old like her, have to get that idea from somewhere? Like…her family? The people we see at synagogue every week?
Just, wow, we have a lot of talking to do. I am not sure how to present it. This is the child who envisions herself being rich and entitled and served when she grows up. How will that translate to the idea that people who look different on the outside are the same (anatomically speaking) on the inside? Maybe that’s the way to start…logic is not Miss M’s strong suit, but we will have to begin somewhere. Because while perhaps the adult Laura Ingalls writing about the child Laura Ingalls can see past Ma’s racism, I’m not entirely sure my six year old can.
PS I am against banning books. While I currently have a heavy hand in what Miss M reads (alone and together), it goes without saying that one day she will have free run of our library and whatever else is out in the big bad world. I guess I would like to keep her away from the scary hard stuff for a little while longer, but better that she sees it with a guide instead of on her own.
PPS Some of what we’re experiencing with Miss M now is what many people experience with a child of around 4. “Why does s/he look different/strange/weird?” She was usually wrapped up in her self or her own…whatever (chasing imaginary butterflies or some such) at that age, so we didn’t have to deal with it then.
* This is not the word that originally came to mind. But this is a family blog. Usually.
Thank you for this post. As an American Indian parent of a 6-year-old, I’ve purposely avoided reading the Little House series to my boy, and have no intention of bringing it into the house. I remember reading, and loving those books, as a child, but I also remember that flush of shame when I read those passages about Native people. As it is, we have to do a lot of explaining about how that was another time when people were openly mean to each other when we read a lot of books from eras 1 and 2, but it never makes it easier. Explaining race and American history is the subject of a lot of doctoral dissertations, but when we try to make sense of it for a young child, I find it nearly impossible. I can’t really say, “well, those people are just bad people.” and I can’t just NOT bring those books into the house, but as of late we’ve had conversations about this issue on an almost weekly basis.
If it’s any help, I’ve been trying to frame the conversation for my kids on how they can be a leader in their classroom and with their peers by recognizing when people are being mean and not playing a part in it. Because racism, like meanness, is often subtle, this has been a great teaching and learning exercise for our family.
Thanks again for this. I’ve loved reading about your adventures, and this was a great reminder of how much I like your writing.
I totally understand your perspective. At the same time, I feel like reading this series (as much as I didn’t necessarily want the entree) is giving me a springboard to talk about this, even in the most basic terms.
Because a) we’re facing it already;
b) there is much more out there –I feel like Mark Twain is less “optional” (as it were) for my kids’ American Lit education, which I am in charge of, living outside of the U.S.;
c) Jews as a “race” have been the target of nasty racial campaigns themselves. This will definitely come up at school. The Holocaust is discussed and memorialized from 1st grade; in Israel the Holocaust is intertwined with the founding of the country.
d) We live in a place that has racial stratifications, both within the Jewish community and outside of it. A local friend pointed this out to me, and while she didn’t point it out to her (also young) kids while reading Little House, it was definitely in her consciousness.
Do you think that you would ask your son not to read them later? When I got to a certain age (10? 11?) my mom told me that she wasn’t going to stop me from reading whatever I wanted, but that she thought I was too young to read Sophie’s Choice. I mean, if I had been 15 I would have run directly to the library, but at that age I appreciated that she was treating me like a grown up, sort of, and I didn’t read it.
I have to do enough explaining about racism in books on a weekly basis that I don’t think I need to invite more discussions about it. For us, the biggest problem is that it was and still is fairly acceptable to portray Native people in a negative light and chalk it up to history. And I think it’s a lot different if you’re reading these books as a member of the group being unfairly portrayed. I clearly remember the deep flush of shame I felt as a child when I would read about Natives in books like the LH books. These sorts of portrayals only help to perpetuate the internalized racism a lot of people from historically oppressed populations feel.
I’m not going to prevent my child from seeking out books that he’s interested, but I’m also not going to go out of my way to seek out books that are deliberately unflattering about Native people, like the LH books are. Luckily for me, my son has no interest in this sort of historical fiction so usually we stumble on to these sorts of depictions by accident (Peter Pan, anyone?) (Homer Price was the most recent book where we started with discussions about how they used to think it was okay to dress children up as “wild indians” and create mythologies about getting the Indians drunk and taking away their land as part of the local lore- that book ended up having almost half a chapter skipped because my kid is still too young and too innocent to have to deal with historical trauma.) I also will be sure to engage my kids in lengthy discussions about how race is depicted when they read Huck Finn, but I’m not going to keep them from reading Huck Finn.
Unfortunately for us, we have a lot of conversations about racism in my house, because we run into it a lot. I don’t need to invite more of these conversations into our lives right now, because I have to pace myself for a lifetime of this. I still have these conversations with my own dad, just to get some balance in my life. It never goes away.
Thanks again for your comments. While I kind of hate that books just can’t be for pleasure anymore (and I can see that I have a lot of work to do with my kids!), I really appreciate your insights and will keep them in mind as we talk.
We’re starting to get here with my 4yo daughter and will be looking for tips to work through this issue. One book we have in our home library that kind of introduces this topic is Whoever You Are by Mem Fox. Kind of basic, but might be a helpful conversation starter.
I haven’t gotten to this yet, so I don’t know what I’ll do. But I suspect the “right” answer is to take it as an opportunity to have an open and frank discussion about racism. Age appropriate, of course. Did you read the Nurture Shock chapter on the topic? That argues that kids see race so we need to talk about race. I didn’t love the book as much as some, but that chapter made a lot of sense to me so we’ve started trying to do that. But OMG is it awkward.
And I can’t say that I’m at all excited about the chance to do this as part of our bedtime routine!
(FWIW, I read the entire series as a kid and can’t remember this AT ALL. And I had a Navajo classmate at about the time I would have been reading the books.)
I don’t remember it at all either! I wonder how it’s treated in Caddie Woodlawn, which is a book I remember reading later (maybe when I was around 10ish, around the same age that I read the Anne of Green Gables books). I do recall that Caddie winds up spending time at an “Indian camp,” but don’t remember how she gets there or what the reactions/interactions of the adults are.
And I didn’t read Nuture Shock–I was already here when Moxie did it, so it would have been too complicated to find–but I followed the thread about the race chapter. And felt completely overwhelmed.
In the end, I think it boils down to our behavior as parents. When they are adults the kids will make their own decisions and we can hope for the best. Of course discussion is important, and reaction to the things they say (and learn in school). But the kids are watching us in real life. Recently at our Shabbat table, someone used the term, “shvartze” to describe a black person. I told the person that that word was offensive; he asked–why? It’s just a yiddish translation. After much discussion (since when is he a Yiddish speaker? What about the tone of what is said? And of course he is being disingenious) he sheepishly agreed that the word, in the context he used it was offensive. My kids said nothing but I felt them listening closely. I didn’t think we needed to discuss the conversation afterward; it was, in it of itself, a learning experience for them.
Kate/OTE: it’s funny to me that I share some but not all of the “classic” formative experiences that other American kids had, because we bounced back & forth from PR to NYC throughout the first 10yrs of my life. The Little House books were never even on my radar, and my oldest son never got interested in them, so for the longest time I only knew of them marginally and mostly due to the TV series, which I never watched because it was too syrupy and seemed to me to be an overly romanticized version of the time. Recently, there was a very interesting discussion about it on Jezebel (which I rarely ever read, don’t even know how on earth I wound up reading about LH on Jezebel, LMAO!) and I was very surprised at the impassioned discussion that took place there WRT to the books and people’s memories of reading them. Something I walked away with from the discussion is that Ma Ingalls’ hatred for Indians has to be placed within the context of her fear for her family’s life & security, given that the Ingalls family kept moving further into what was at the time still tribal lands. *shrug*
Ultimately, it does come down to the example you set, the people you choose to surround yourself with, etc. The books will be something that you can discuss & try to put into context. Then yes, there will be Twain, and studies of slavery and the US Civil War. As your kids learn about the Jews’ enslavement, that will help show them that many cultures/societies/races have been discriminated against, sometimes for no better reason than being an “other” (and when I say better, of course I don’t mean there is ever a good reason for enslaving another human, just that it makes slightly more sense to see a group of people enslaved after losing a battle/war instead of just because of their ethnicity/religion). I don’t have a quick & easy answer for you because in PR we had lots of prejudice and I had no patience for it. As a very fair-skinned PRican, I experienced it at home and in the US. Sometimes I’m gentle when I call it out, sometimes I’m not. Now that we live in the South, lemme tell ya, race is an ISSUE and in a whole different way than it was in the West. So I’m having to come up with new ways of dealing with it and talking about it to my youngest. But again, it comes down to us as parents, to how diverse our circle is, to how they see us interact with those “others”. We spoke about it with Ian on MLK day, about why Dr. King was such an important figure in US history, and he was appalled at the idea of separate everything for whites and non-whites. His world has always been so diverse, he can’t imagine any other way. So we’ll have to point things out to him as they come up. One of my biggest issues right now with him is gender-related, all this business about what boys and men can do vs what girls and women can do, THAT is driving me up the wall and making me feel guilty that I’m not out in the workforce in a male-dominated career anymore. (and what books are y’all reading to your 6yos? Ours are starting to seem pretty vanilla compared to what y’all seem to be reading)
I didn’t know there was such prejudice against the Sephardim… my ancestors!!! What is that about???
Baila: I want to be your friend! 🙂 ♥
I don’t know that they were a classic formative experience…they certainly weren’t part of the school curriculum. I remember a huge unit in Social Studies/History on pioneering/westward expansion in 5th or 6th grade, but literature about that period wasn’t included.
well, just in the smaller sample of your readership, and the greater sample of the Jezebel readership that commented on that article I read, it seems to me like the Little House series was pretty prevalent among girls who were avid readers, no? I remember reading Little Women and Little Men when I was in 5th-6th grade in NYC, and I had complete freedom to go to the public library near Lincoln Center and check out whatever books I wanted from there. I don’t remember any girls I was friends with mentioning the books (or I might’ve read them). However, my cousin who is 3yrs younger than me and who was raised here in the South not only read them, but is now proudly living the “Little House lifestyle” as an organic family farmer on 5 acres. I wonder what the public library availability of the LH series was throughout the states, if it was something less likely to appear on Northeastern shelves than elsewhere? How were *you* introduced to it? Will you be reading them with your son as well?
FWIW, Narnia & LOTR didn’t hit my radar either until my firstborn was of an age to read them. I knew of them but they’d never seemed to me to be as interesting as all the magic realism I read from the amazing Latin American authors I was hooked on. And I will probably actively discourage my youngest from reading the Harry Potter series anytime soon (if at all), because I found those books overly dark for the younger age group it wound up being marketed to, and because I found them lacking in general.
I still want to know what everyone’s reading to/with their 6yos…
I honestly don’t remember how I found the Little House books. Definitely NOT through the TV series–I’ve never seen it. I definitely would read it with AM if he were interested. We’re not quite up to chapter books with him; he prefers something different every night.
I also will not allow Miss M to start with Harry Potter yet. I enjoyed the beginning of the series (somewhere around book 5 it turned into a chore), but think it’s way too dark for a kid her age.
I read the Little House on the Prairie books to my kids — and as well, books like the Betsy-Tacy books which casually mention actors wearing blackface or the Misty of Chincoteague books which feature incredible sexism. Many, many famous books are racist, sexist, androcentric, homophobic, etc .
I would always stop reading as soon as something like that jumped out at me, and we’d talk about the racist/sexist passage. I thought it was a great opportunity to point this stuff out to my kids because — let’s fact it — racist and sexist stuff still exists in the dominant culture and it’s better to notice it so we can fight it.
I think the shocking part for my kids (and maybe for me) was how accepted racist/sexist attitudes were — and how “normal” they were for even for characters appeared to be perfectly nice people otherwise.
We had these discussions whenever we watched television shows or went to the movies as well. Sadly, there are no end to opportunities to point out racism/sexism in our culture.
Considering that the Indians were basically at war with the settlers, the pronouncement wasn’t so out of line. I’m not overly fond of our neighbors in Ramallah. I’m scared of them. Their leadership supports killing people like me. Am I racist? Maybe. I think a few massacres/bombings/etc makes a racist out of a lot of people.
There is the parallel.
But there is also the context (that “anti-settler” groups here would also make, I think) that the Native peoples were there first (unequivocally, unlike here) and they were utterly stripped of any kinds of rights and their land was considered ownerless and free for the taking. The US government, rather than thinking of some sort of fair settlement, continued to basically ignore them or mollified them with minor concessions when they had pretty much been beaten into submission. This has, since the 1600s, been an ugly footnote in American history.
see, and for me as a child of the early 70s keenly aware of the ills of US colonialism & expansionism thanks to my own homeland’s political status, the LH books would’ve been something that pushed a lot of buttons even then.
I think the issue is that she says “I don’t like Indians” when actually the truth is that she’s afraid of them. Historical background and valid claims or not, you’ve got a mention of a massacre in those pages. Caroline is afraid of her family being killed, and she doesn’t like the people who, valid beef or not, are at war with her people and might, as a result, kill her family.
What’s incredible in the book is that Charles doesn’t have the same point of view.
So really does it all boil down to the fact that if it were up to Caroline she never would have left Wisconsin? But she DOESN’T have a choice–Charles wants to go; she is a woman in the 1870s (or whenever); and that’s that?
Of course based on the opening chapter it seems like Charles’ livelihood, such as it is (hunting and trapping), is potentially threatened because of the encroachment of people on the land.
It is interesting how these questions shift a little bit to match new historical realities but never really go away. Hmmm.
This has been an interesting discussion. (I have always been a LH fan.) I was interested to note, when reading them to six-year-old Peach last year, that Charles and Laura wanted to continue on to Oregon, but Caroline didn’t want to go that far, and so they stopped in the Midwest. Ma and Pa seemed like a team most of the time, and while as a former Oregonian, I think they made a mistake staying in the Dakotas, I was glad to see that Pa didn’t push Ma to go farther than she wanted to go. Life was hard enough as it was.
I didn’t read the series until I was about 8. I think that I understood that she was afraid of the Indians because there was a possible threat to her family. I loved the series as a kid and plan to read it to mine discussing those types of issues as they come up, That is very true that the settlers were pushing them out of their land and brings up the topic as well of how the Native Americans felt about how they were being treated and what their perspective was.
When I read the books, I didn’t associate modern American Indians with those in the books. I’d heard of scalpings and other things like that, and I figured that they were “bad guys” but had somehow turned ok in the meantime. It’s kind of like how Germans were evil during WWII, but now they’re ok.
If the line in a (different) book had been “I don’t like Germans” said by a mother in hiding during WWII, would you feel the same, Kate? Or “I don’t like Americans” by a German mother living in Dresden during the time it was flattened?
Anytime there is an armed conflict, hate is kind of a given.
The six-year-old perspective is frustrating me, I suppose. Because now that people are bringing it up I really want to know what the adults are thinking…how much of a danger was posed to them, how much support the US government was offering, how close to danger they actually were. Did white Americans outside of “Indian territory” (it seems going in that they knew it wasn’t yet fully legally US property) consider this armed conflict?
read this the other day and it really struck a chord, thought I’d share for those participating in the discussion: http://tumblr.com/xlv26k3n3r (link is to Mother Jones’ Tumbler, and a short vignette about privilege)
Very succinct food for thought, thanks.
As a kid in New York (LI) in the 70s/80s, I read the LH books and then a slew of Alcott, among others. Suburban library.
My recollection of Caddie Woodlawn (read this as an adult) is that the interactions are portrayed as situational and not personal when animosity is at hand, and there ARE good personal relationships.
My only note on kids and race is that my kids grew up with hair color/eye color/skin color differences all being lumped together; Daddy’s eyes are brown, Mommy’s are blue, one child has hazel eyes. One repeat Shabbos guest (African descent), and one child’s classmate (from India) are very dark skinned, some of the Israelis are “medium brown”, one of my kids is leaning towards pale olive (with E European roots !!)
We’ve discussed how ‘black’ as a people word means dark brown and ‘white’ means pale pink-ish yellow/orange. White white is albino, more yellow is Oriental, more red is native American, more pale is Scandinavian, more brown is Hispanic or middle eastern, and African and Indian range through the brown shades. And we can all be Americans.
(ok, why am I still up babbling?)
I’m now reading the Little House books to my 6- & 8-year-old girls. There are lots of topics of discussion – racism and sexism being 2 big ones. I don’t think it is necessary to go into deep discussions at their age though. I just answer their questions when they come up with them, but there are so many charming aspects to these books that, frankly, they probably will not really notice the racism. I’m sort of discovering it for the first time now that I’m reading them as an adult. Just because you read about an opposing opinion doesn’t mean that you condone it.
It is interesting as an adult to see Ma’s and Pa’s different values and how they reconcile them. Like when Charles goes down into the well to save his neighbor even while Caroline is screaming at him to not do it. It’s a disappointment that Caroline is superficial and racist and selfish, but she was a woman of her time. I think women have made great strides since then.
BTW, my children are growing in Southern France in a very multi-cultural environment and although I don’t explicitly lecture them about race, they are still rather colorblind at the moment. They are Franco-Korean by blood and Franco-American by culture. They are starting to field race questions by strangers, but it doesn’t bother them yet. I don’t think the Little House books will have much of an impact on their prejudices (or lack thereof).