“Oh, I love the Arthur books,” the new check-out girl at the library raved. “They’re such fun!”<\/p>\n
I smiled politely and remained silent as she checked out my monthly half-dozen children’s picture books.<\/p>\n
I am at that point in my read-every-book challenge where I’m yet again reading a massive children’s picture book series that I don’t particularly like. <\/p>\n
This time, it’s Marc Brown’s Arthur<\/em>.<\/p>\n Apart from the fact that it’s a massive series and that it’s repetitive and that the stories aren’t particularly interesting, what bugs me about Marc Brown’s Arthur series is how many meanies<\/strong> there are.<\/p>\n Almost every book includes some form of sibling rivalry, classroom taunting, or other mild bullying (although I fear to use that word, given the current anti-bullying craze.) <\/p>\n I understand the point. Teasing happens. Bullying happens. Brown wants to portray child life as it is, give children something to identify with. Furthermore, he probably wants kids to develop empathy with Arthur (frequently the recipient of the teasing) and hopefully to learn that it isn’t nice to bully and taunt. All understandable and noble goals.<\/p>\n But, while I can’t remember exactly where I read it (maybe Nurture Shock<\/em>?), I remember reading that such attempts generally backfire. Rather than producing empathy and encouraging children to avoid taunting, hearing stories about children being teased only adds to a child’s arsenal of ways to pick on other children. Children don’t come up with “four-eyes” on their own – they hear it on a television show or read about it in Arthur’s Eyes<\/em>. And when they hear about it, they don’t file it away as “something I wouldn’t like to be called” – they file it away as “something to throw at my glasses-wearing-classmate next time I feel like being superior.” <\/p>\n So what kind of stories would I prefer? <\/p>\n I’d prefer stories that focus on kids banding together to overcome obstacles and fight real bad guys – bad guys so scary they’d never want to be them. I prefer the fairy tale version of life, where children must be smart and slay dragons instead of each other.<\/p>\n What do you think of Arthur? Do you have any favorite children’s picture book series?<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Oh, I love the Arthur books,” the new check-out girl at the library raved. “They’re such fun!” I smiled politely and remained silent as she checked out my monthly half-dozen children’s picture books. I am at that point in my read-every-book challenge where I’m yet again reading a massive children’s picture book series that I … Read more Arthur’s Mean [Fill-in-the-blank]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15840"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15840"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16257,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15840\/revisions\/16257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bekahcubed.menterz.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}