I was a voracious reader as a child. I cut my teeth on the corners of "The Cat In The Hat", and pretty much every Seuss book in our neighbors' collection. I'd been given carte blance to visit and 'check out' any title I wanted, and I read them all. Repeatedly. Those and if course, "Where The Wild Things Are".
In Pennsylvania, when I was around 9 or 10, I'd discovered "Stuart Little" by E. B. White and Ronald Dahl's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory", long before Gene Wilder deftly laid claim to the persona of Mr. Wonka and decades before Tim Burton would twist and malign the story to the Depps of despair.
As a parent, I now have the joyous opportunity to pass along the same treasures to my children, and I happily do so, reading Seuss to them at bedtime, or singing along with them in the car to the soundtrack of "Willy Wonka....". And I've been looking about in hopes of finding my copy of Stuart Little, so I might start reading a chapter a night to them for my own pleasure as much as their own.
And as a parent I feel an obligation to help them enjoy the exploration of their imaginations, while steering them clear of too many scary scenarios or more mature situations. We'd rented a DVD recently that was a childs cartoon series, but after just a brief viewing I turned it off because my wife and I both agreed that the main character spoke rudely and disrespectfully to peers and adults. We may seem greatly conservative but as far as we are concerned, there's plenty of years ahead for them to be a part of "the real world" and for the time being, we want them immersed in the innocence and wonder of youth. Just as we were.
E. B. White also wrote "Charlotte's Web", and I have the 2006 movie version in our collection. They've not watched it yet because I feel that they're still a bit too young and effected by the sadness in some of the things they have see. For example, my son saw "Beauty & the Beast" and was very upset when the Beast was cut and hurt by Gaston. So we are careful. Tonight I skimmed through "Charlotte's Web" to check it out. It's quite delightful. But at the same time, if I can't get through the death scene of the spider without welling up myself, I'm hard pressed to imagine that they'll do any better. So we'll be waiting on that one and perhaps diverting them towards "Babe" in the mean time.
