The Scary World for Kids...

Think about Hansel and Gretl, the Big Bad Wolf, monsters and dragons in the forest and other tales that have been handed down by generations to teach children about the dangers and realities of the world.  People used to die young in much greater numbers and death was part of life.  My mother and great aunt used to sing a song about "babes in the woods" who just laid down and died.  When I was then carrying on the songs to my children, we all wondered why in the world a mother would sing such awful things to her children.  Well, our world has changed but our traditions, from the time when oral lessons were the main teaching tools, still are handed down.

Now children are taught to be scared of different types of dangers (but we don't sing about being careful about giving information away on the internet to our small children).  About the only reality we really face from the natural world is sharks.  But the comeback of the crocs and gators made me look at this photo and think of the boogie bears of years past. How gruesome.   The scary renditions when I was growing up? Atomic bomb drills - hiding under the desks at school. As if that could help.

It is a Reuters News Picture of the Year,  of a crocodile at a zoo in the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung.  It holds the forearm of a zoo veterinarian who had been trating it in between its teeth on April 11, 2007 and was one of the top emailed photos on Yahoo!  What Reuters doesn't show is that the man had his hand surgically reattached, according to National Geographic's tale of the photo in its Top Ten Photos from National Geographic News.

motherhoodsociety

Comments

[Rhonda]

sometimes it can be a scary world for adults too. :O
Especially if your a Vet.

[Claude]

A horror story that ends well! Like the tales of our childhood
Happy New Year

[anthony]

I had a friend bitten by a brown recluse spider and almost died. I grew up around snakes, snakes, snakes, poisonous ones like copperheads, corals, cottonmouth (water moccasin), and of course rattle snakes. I was out with my son and a friend once and a large alligator had just eaten another man's dog, it caused you to look around quite a bit before you stepped! For me, there was a lot more than sharks to be concerned with. On orally passing down stories, I too grew up and wondered why we were taught songs like "ring around the rosies" and a hundred more, that all were about death. Maybe you are correct, they were there for a purpose.

[munchkinmom]

So, was he training the gator? I wasn't sure...

[MotherPie]

It looks like bad english "they just laid down and died" but when things are passed down orally, I'm not sure of the orality of the spelling. Re-reading my post made me eve more aware of the move from orality to visual traditions...

[allison]

I hear and read that our society is fairly death-phobic. I wonder about the origin of these songs. Maybe back in a time or in a society when death was more integrated into people's lives these songs weren't so scary. I sang ring around the rosies to my kids before I ever even knew what it was about. Good parenting on my part, huh?!

[Pearl]

I agree with Allison... I think we're more "death-phobic" than we ever were before. That and more "visual", as you said MotherPie.

I opt out of both these things. I prefer to believe when it's my time, it's my time... and I don't want to see when "the time" hits for others either.

Blessed ignorance... I love it.

God bless all for a happy and healthy new year~ Pearl

[Kathy]

My son and his friends killed a baby rattlesnake in a friend's backyard a few years ago. Our old neighborhood had mountain lions and coyotes when we lived there. But really, I'm more afraid of my teens driving and of the potentially dangerous choices they can make. Maybe I should compose a song about them.