Throughout her impressive four-year tenure on this planet, my daughter has always been delighted by the macabre. We trace it back to a bit of a slip up when she was very small and she accidentally saw the scene in Jurassic Park where the 2 kids are trapped in the kitchen with a couple of massive raptors trying to guzzle them.
Much to my surprise, my daughter fell about laughing, thrilled by the danger of the chase. Since then it’s been ghosts and goblins galore, and I’ve been encouraging this little quirk of hers.
To that end, I bought her the timeless classic Not Now, Bernard by David McKee. If you’re not familiar with the story, it centres around a little boy called Bernard who spends the morning trying to get his parents’ attention. However, they’re busy with their chores and reading the newspapers and dismiss him with the titular phrase. Then, just a couple of pages in, Bernard is eaten by a monster he meets in his garden. His parents fail to notice this gruesome turn of events and continue to dismiss and chide the monster, mistaking it for their son. The monster is eventually sent to bed.
At storytime in house, it was a huge success. My daughter loved it and my partner and I felt suitably scolded.
I bought my daughter the timeless classic Not Now, Bernard by David McKee. If you’re not familiar with the story, it centres around a little boy called Bernard who spends the morning trying to get his parents’ attention.
We have the original edition from 1980, but a new edition was released in 2020. While the narrative and the cautionary tale are the same, the things Bernard’s parents are distracted by have been updated to be more culturally relevant – they ignore Bernard because they’re consumed by their smartphones and tablets.
I like it. It’s a smart idea to keep a classic book relatable and reflect a society that’s recognisable to this current generation of parents with young children. But it got me thinking about what else has changed since the original was published 45 years ago.
My partner posed the question: if the book was written now, what or who might the monster represent? Who or what does the modern-day parent fear might sneak into their child’s life with such stealth, they don’t detect there’s a problem until the child’s mind is well and truly warped.
My partner suggested it might be Andrew Tate – poisoning the minds of children and an upsetting amount of adults who should know better. We worry about little boys being told that women are less than them, but surely there’s also the danger that little girls will hear this rhetoric and begin to internalise it.
If the book was written now, what or who might the monster represent? Who or what does the modern-day parent fear might sneak into their child’s life with such stealth, they don’t detect there’s a problem until the child’s mind is well and truly warped.
For my part, I’ve been getting more and more worried about the general mis and disinformation being thrown around on the internet – often from sources I would have traditionally seen as trustworthy. Could there be a time in my future where I’m arguing with my daughter about whether climate change is even real? Will she insist that the earth is flat or that senior politicians are involved in a paedophilia ring operating out of a Washington pizza restaurant.
Perhaps she’ll be sucked in by the general hate directed at people who could be seen as ‘different’. Could she start to believe that trans people are a threat to her safety? Could a lifetime of being raised to be empathetic and generous to other people be undone by some AI slop that insists that people who are a different race to her are the enemy? Maybe we’ll recycle some old classics and she’ll become convinced that single mothers are the precursor to all of society’s ills.
Yes, all generations were exposed to threats growing up, but are children today more susceptible to brainwashing because they’re exposed to so much more of the world at a much younger age than their predecessors because of the internet. There are parental controls and age limits to steer them away from obviously graphic material, but short of recording their screens, there’s no easy way to be sure that you’re seeing everything they are.
All we can really do as parents is to arm our daughter so that should the monster ever sneak into our garden, she’ll know enough to be able to tell them to go and fuck themself.
And that’s probably for the best. Once they hit a certain age, I believe that children should be trusted to have some degree of privacy. In the lead up to this privacy though, we need to have taught our children skills like reading comprehension, media literacy and how to avoid confirmation bias.
Because I suppose all we can really do as parents is to arm our daughter so that should the monster ever sneak into our garden, she’ll know enough to be able to tell them to go and fuck themself.