A few days back, I posted what I tell my kids about Santa, asking if it’s Ok to lie to your kids– the gist of the post being “Now I believe that all these myths serve a brilliant purpose: a gentle way for kids to learn well-intended parents are not always reliable sources of truth.”

I didn’t write anything about Heaven, just put it in the title of my post, but got a lot of comments on the blog, email etc.

My six year old starting freaking out about death when she was three. She was crying in the night, “I don’t want to die!” Maybe because I had my second daughter around this time. I asked my doctor what to do and she asked me what I believed in and that just confused me further. My daughter was only three, I figured the most important thing was for her to feel safe and loved and that everything was okay. So I told her about Heaven, I told her about reincarnation, I named all the people who loved her, put their names into a song, stroked her hair until she fell asleep.

I guess what I feel about Heaven is essentially the same message I was trying to get across about Santa; kids are going to have to figure out stuff on their own eventually. No one knows for certain what happens after you die. Mortality is something all humans will grapple with as they get older but kids are not small adults; three years old is too young to grapple.

I heard there is a book by Maria Shriver for kids about death and also I know there are a couple about pets who die, one Bernestain bears about a dead fish. I’ll read them and rate them.

What do you tell your kids about heaven?

This comment on the earlier post from Kim:

What confuses me more is what to do about heaven. For some reason I feel stranger about perpetuating that story than Santa’s– I wonder if it’s because I’m less 100% sure heaven is a fairytale. Or because the context of confronting mortality (“But I don’t want to die!” my daughter said– yikes, I was totally unprepared to deal with that from a four year old, though I should have been) is so much more serious. But after telling my kid in a kind of wobbly way “Well, many people believe that when you die you go to a place called Heaven, where you get to be with everyone you love,” I felt much more conflicted and unsure about how to handle the conversation or whether I was doing teh right thing than I ever have felt about leaving milk, cookies, and raisins for Santa. Go figure…

I highly recommend two books ***GGG rating***  empowering for girls: Goddesses: the World of Myth and Magic and Princess Hyacinth (the Surprising Tale of a Girl who Floated)

Goddesses: the World of Myth and Magic– the illustrations are beautiful, the text for each goddess is concise and fascinatng. There are many goddesses featured that I had never heard of: young and old, short hair, long hair, all ethnicities, good and bad. They are all described in cool and original ways, even ones I was familar with I learned new things about. Both my daughters sat turning the pages, interested enough to give me an hour time to make dinner without disturbance (I’m talking TV/Sponge Bob absorption level.) Here’s the Amazon link if you want to learn more (I need to learn how to do these links)

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_0_17?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=goddesses+a+world+of+myth+and+magic&sprefix=Goddesses+a+world

Second recommedation, newly published: Princess Hyacinth (the Surprising Tale of a Girl who Floated)

Yes, she is a princess but this book is a great example of successfully appropriating classic female imagery and narrative, making it wonderful and powerful.

Princesss Hyacinth has a flowery name but not a flowery look. As a brown haired, brown eyed girl myself, I always appreciate when the star of a kids book has my (and my middle daughter) not so typically princessy coloring. This story is also great to explain narrative style to kids because it begins: “Princess Hyacinth had a problem.” (I tell my kids every story has a problem because creating that problem helps them focus when they tell their own stories, which otherwise tend to go on and on and on.) Hyacinth has a magical power– her problem is she floats, so her parents keep her inside and weigh her down with a heavy crown (which shows kids being a princess isn’t so great after all.) She has a crush on a boy who flies a kite, but she’s not sure if he likes her or not. One day, she’s outside and sees a bunch of baloons. She takes off her clothes, except for her royal underwear, and the baloon guy lets her float up, holding on to her with a string. He loses his grip, and she is off– somersaulting and flying about, having a great time. But her parenst are very worried, no one can find her or get her down. Suddenly, she is tangled up in the boy’s kite, and he reels her in. After that, every day she goes out and floats and every evening, the boy she loves reels her in; then they go to the palace together and have tea and popcorn. I look at this as a perfect fantasy/ metaphor for love and marriage (and one that men have written about in various ways in grown up books and actually created in the real world for ages); Hyacinth gets to go out on her own, flying and having adventures, but knows the boy she loves truly understands and appreciates her unique magical power; will always be able to find her and bring her safely home.  Here’s the link to more info on Amazon.

When my six year old brought this book home today, I got chills. I have a vivid memory of reading it, actually learning to love to read with this book. I lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma then. I was in first grade, just as my daughter is now. My teacher’s name was Miss Foote. She had very short hair which was radical for Oklahoma in the seventies. She was reading The Boxcar Children to the class but at a chapter a day, moving way to slow for me, so my mom bought me my own copy.

I only read the first two chapters with my daughters tonight, but I remember the illustrations so well: they are all in silouette. I can’t remember the story yet, but the pacing is perfect; my kids were riveted. I have no idea what my rating will be, but I hope high. Do you remember this book?

Update on this series: Today Lucy brought home Maya, the Harp Fairy. She’s a fairy of color as are three other fairies in this mini-series of 7 music fairies. As I wrote earlier in my post below, in all the fairy books I’ve read (in this seemingly endless series– feels like I’ve read millions, but probably just about 50) I’d only came across just one non-white fairy: Inky. She’s the Indigo fairy. After legions of magical white girls, it seems pretty sterotyping that four more fairies of color suddenly appear in the music series. Can they play sports too?

Here’s what I wrote about a month ago:

The Rainbow Magic series documents the adventures of  two human girls, Rachel Walker and Kirsty Tate and their travels into the fairy world. At the start of every book, they are summoned to help their flying friends escape terrible danger.

The good points:

(1) Female friendship: Rachel and Kirsty are great friends. They are loyal, help each other, and are the stars of each book.

(2) Every book also has a girl fairy in the title and pictured on the cover. There are Rainbow Fairies, Weather Fairies; Jewel Fairies, Days of the Week Fairies, Petal Fairies, and Special Edition Fairies– 7 of each.

(3) Kirsty and Rachel are brave, smart and heroic. They have magical powers when in fairy world, and rescue the fairies every time, usually helping to restore their magic to them.

(4) Both my 6 year old and my 3 year old LOVE this series.

Not so good:

(1) The numerous faries are so sterotypically female looking, I cannot imagine a boy reading these books with covers like this, when in fact these are action/ adventure books and what boy doesn’t want to fly? If these fairies just looked less frilly and hovering, and were actually shown doing some of the cool action moves they act out in the stories, they  could have more universal appeal both to boys and to that side of girls that, so often, gets repressed instead experessed.

(If you read film critic Glen Kenny’s unoriginal rebuttal to my critique of the movie, Ratatouille, he writes that it’s just a fact: girls will see movies starring boys, little boys refuse to see movies starring girls. We’re talking about 3 year olds here! Even if this were true, which it’s not, it’s just fine in this case to let your little kid refuse to do something? Aren’t parents supposed to challenge kids out of comfort zone? With movies and toys, it’s so often becomes a case of parents enthusiastically reinforcing gender sterotypes and being comforted when they see their kids fall neatly into them.)

The Rainbow Series covers always emphasize how the fairies look, not what they can do. Fairies are usually pictured just hovering, motion-stopped, wings spread against a background of sparkles, looking more like pinned butterflies then super-action fairies; long flowing hair, mini skirt flared, knee high boots; always smiling and almost always caucasian, except for one brown skinned one  (out of 50!) called Inky (???) the Indigo Fairy. (I admit we don’t have all the books so let me know if there some other fairies of color in this series.)

(2) Same damn plot in every story. Wicked Jack Frost does something to the fairies– steals their jewels, their magic, maybe kidnaps one; then Kirsty and Rachel are called from the human world to win over Jack Frost, his possy of goblins, and save the fairies. Could they make Jack Frost turn good one time? Or some other villian besides him? His even more evil older brother? Or sister? Hmmm…how much do these writers get paid?

The Rainbow Magic Series gets a GG/S rating.

I love this guy. He has written one of my all time favorite kids books: Amos and Boris. There are no girls in this story (and girls don’t feature prominently in many of his wonderful books).

I am updating the rest of my post. Kim comments Steig has a book called Brave Irene (LOVE the title) about a girl who brings a dress through a snowstorm (OK, it’s a dress, probably being delivered to a princess for a ball or something, but still, this is good news and I will read the book.)

Kim also mentions The Amazing Bone, about a girl pig who discovers a magic bone who helps her escape a hungry wolf. I do know this story, and certainly a girl is featured prominently, though I do beleive the bone is the star. Pearl, the pig is pretty smart and cool, and loving, and thanks to Kim’s comments, Steig gets upgraded to one G, maybe more after I read Brave Irene.

I orinially blogged about Steig just because he is such a beautiful writer; his books are poetry, Amos and Boris especially. I do teach my kids about narrative, language, and story telling when I read to them (or when we make up stories) I tell theam “Every story needs a problem and a resolution. In a story, the problem is called the plot.” I use Steig to teach them about great writing though they just want me to shut up and read so mostly I do, they get bored when I’m talking– they are 3 and 6, after all

A female in the title of a book series is not always a sign of girl empowerment. The Little Miss books are some of the worst ever. Just the title phrase, “Little Miss,” is irritating, and the personalities of these girl characters are even more annoying. Following the Little Miss moniker, there is often a sterotypical “female” negative characteristic, for example charcaters include Little Miss Bossy (Do people ever call boys bossy? Or would it be “Little Mr. Assertive”?) There is Little Miss Chatterbox, Little Miss Tidy, Little Miss Scatterbrain etc.Usually, the Little Miss is the only girl up against five or six innocent males she is causing trouble for with names like Mr. Clever (Not little Mr. Clever) and Doctor Makeyouwell.

Ivy and Bean is a book series that earns a GGG rating. Highly recommmended. It’s my current favorite: two mischevious girls who are best friends always going off on adventures. The series is realy about a friendship between two girls, they are competitive but also kind; the girls names are in the tile of every book, and the stories are entertaining and fun to read, the perfect level got my first grader to read on her own.

So maybe it’s my fault. I read People Magazine and Us Weekly way too much. Every week. I do it in part because, not having time to actually see grown up movies and watch TV, reading about stuff keeps me up on what’s going on, what I will see if I ever have time, and keeps me up on pop culture in general. I read the tabs the same reason I immerse myself in other media, because I am a deconstructionist; I don’t think I can seaparate myself from the influences of our culture on us and our kids, so I try to keep as educated and informed as possible to set myself free. People is kind of like my cliff notes.

But really, I read the tabloids because it relaxes me the way watching bad TV never quite does. I can still space out and worry about my real life while watching Gossip Girl, thoughts intrude like bills I need to pay or deadlines I have to keep. But  the tabloids require just enough brain power (maybe because it’s actually reading) for me to focus and get a vacation from my life for about an hour.

But not this week. People Magazine was so apalling, I was too mad to sleep. I should have known, there were early signs. When my husband came home from Safeway, his hands full of groceries, I asked him if he’d bought me People, and he said, “I couldn’t do it. It was too stupid.”

I said, “But it’s always stupid.”

He said, “I can’t remember what it was but it was really bad.”

The next day, on my own trip to Safeway, I discovered it myself. People’s cover featured famous rock star-virgin Kevin Jonas of Jonas brother fame getting married to  his bride Danielle Deleasa. (I remember the first time my husand and I saw the Jonas Brothers on TV; it was maybe five years ago, they were performng at the VMAs or some music award show, and we saw these three boys rocking out and we thought, “My God, they are  little kids. We must be really old.”)

For years, Kevin wore a promise ring showing his commitment to save himself until marriage. I suppose there is some gender equality there– usually its pop-princesses Britney Spears and Jessica Simpson doing that (or actress Brooke Shields when I was a kid, never mind she played a child prostitute in screen, and later admitted she’d had sex before marriage with a guy at Princeton who went on to play Superman on TV) As a wedding present, Kevin gave Danielle real glass slippers custom made in her size. Guess what her favorite movie is, ever since she was a kid? Yes, now she’s proud to be a real life Cinderella.

OK, but that’s not actually what got me upset about People this week. It was inside the magazine– a two page photographic spread on fat brides. People is challenging these women– six of them are ethinically diverse, equality!– to lose wight before their weddings, all coming up in this Fall. The humiliating photo shows the women literally, squeezing into these tacky dresses, bras popping out, zippers stuck, each one has a cartoon look of distress on her face. I don’t even know how I would begin to explain this photo to my kids. This is exactly the kids of imagery I would like to have warning lables on, rating it triple SSS for Stereotype- KEEP AWAY FROM YOUR GIRLS. (I guess I should start by kicking my habit.)

The next couple pages after the photo shows these women with ther fiances, many quite handsome, all expressing love for these women. Why couldn’t this article headline “I Love my Fiancee Just the Way She Is” or “I’m Fat, In Love and Getting Married, Who Cares What I Weigh.” Instead of the actual headline “I Want to Lose Weight for my Wedding”

More than once, my kids have pointed to someone in a public place and said “She’s fat.” or “She has a big butt.” I don’t shush them up because they  are making an observation, I don’t want them to think fat or big is a terrible, unmentionable thing. (Though if they persist, I do tell them people’s bodies are private and stop commenting. They also do this when they see a bald guy, “He has no hair!”)

I also tell my kids when they say things to each other like “You’re a big fat liar,” or something like that, that there is nothing wrong with being fat. (Does fat in this phrase refer to the lie? Meaing it s a big lie? Or that the person who is telling the lie is fat which is what I always thought? I have no idea what it means andneither do they, I just don’t want “fat” programmed in them starting at this young age as an insult;  Junie B. Jones is a chapter book series they love. Junie B is always calling someone fat and a liar, so be prepared if your kids get this book.) I tell my kids we all come in different shapes and sizes. Some people are tall, some are thin, some people have brown skin, some white, it’sa ll just different, one is not better than the other. (I think Po Bronson recently wrote a book about how to talk about race and kids, that you should talk about it at ayoung age b/c they notice differences in how people look,  I don’t know if Bronson writes about body size.)

I don’t tell my kids thin people are healthier than fat people. Who knows what thin people are doing? Smoking packs of cigarettes a day, snorting coke? Puking in the bathroom? There are many fat healthy people and many unhealthy skinny people. Ironically, another person featured in this weeks weight obsessed issue of People (there are also long articles on family weight loss, losing half their size etc, I guessits the New Year’s resolution issue) is Brittany Murphy who likely died from some complications of anorexia. Actress Kathy Najimy is quoted saying of her: “We hope that in honor of her life…the pressures that girls and women face will fade.” Not in the pages of the tabloids.

I love the guy. I’m not sure why. Maybe because all the characters are so emotional; the radical mood swings, everyone always bursting into tears– all that drama is just like being a kid. I think it’s pretty original to depict childhood in a bunch of sea creatures mostly by echoing its emotional life.

Though Sponge Bob is a typical boy cartoon though with the male featured in the title and the theme of boy BFFs. I don’t really get why people say Patrick the starfish is gay– because he is pink? (I do understand the same claims for Tinky Winky– the teletubbie  who carries a purse Rush Limbaugh got so worked up about and Herbie, the misfit elf with the fabulous hair.)

Sandy, the squirrel, is the only regular female character but she is awesome. Not only is she a great fighter (karate expert) but  she’s smarter and clamer than everyone else on the show. Compared to all those hissy fits, she acts like she’s on Lexapro, but I’ll attribute her maturity to her gender. Unfortunately, Sandy doesn’t get enough screen time.

Spong Bob gets one G because has a strong girl power character, is original and breaks some stereotypes.