The above illustration is in a book of DSOs, called The Cat in the Hat Beginner Book Dictionary, published 1964. Big Sis is in love with it at the moment and requests a reading every night, pausing on all the pictures to ask lots of questions! I suspect it’s an anthropological exercise for her as a lot of what must have been considered every day is now quite odd! A case in point - the whacking picture above!
Big Sis was fascinated by this particular picture - and found the idea of naughty kids being whacked on the bum by adults in the olden days simultaneously horrifying and hilarious! It was not quite so hilarious today however when at swimming lessons what appeared to be a grandmother picked up a crying 4 year old in her care and whacked her very hard twice on the bare bum!
Fortunately Big Sis was on the other side of the pool madly vying for the attention of her beloved swimming instructor. Little Bro witnessed the whole thing and couldn’t believe it! Clinging tightly to me his eyes followed Grandma ‘the smacker’ all the way out of the building, I think he wanted to be sure she didn’t double back and turn on him!
It did make me think - do people still whack their kids? I should say at this point that we don’t. We didn’t make a big decision about it, I’ve never hit anyone - so I assumed we would find other ways to control the kids. I also like to have the moral high ground. If I ever see any aggressive behavior by Big Sis or Little Bro I can firmly reprimand them - telling them that we don’t behave like that in our house.
Another thing we don’t do in our house is judge people, so I tried really hard not to judge poor old Grandma ‘the smacker’! I said to myself, she’s probably had a really hard morning, there’s nothing worse than drying and dressing uncooperative kids, but no matter what I said - I couldn’t help judging her! It just doesn’t seem right to hit kids.
Then I thought about DSOs book and I wondered if she realised the reaction she was inducing in many of the mums and dads sitting around the pool? When she was raising her own kids everyone probably smacked.
Anyway, I was thankful Big Sis missed it - but then again if she had seen it I would have been grateful for DSOs politically incorrect Dr Seuss dictionary - it would have at least given us a starting point for a long and complicated explanation! Which I guess, is one of the main purposes of reading.
reading, smacking, Swimming
February 28th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I couldn’t help laughing when I saw the tags at the bottom of this post - it sounds like a list of activities for a child’s day from hell! First reading, then smacking … followed up by swimming
February 28th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
Life might have been a bit like that for those bears…playing, smacking, reading, smacking, swimming, smacking! I like the explanation “Mother was very angry”. Nothing about the bears behaviour…..maybe the anger relates to something papa bear did or didn’t do!