Ghostbusters!

I found the source of the ghost: a Little Golden Book in which the Sesame Street characters put on a play about feelings. To demonstrate “scared”, Telly Monster cowers under the bed while other Muppets wear costumes showing scary things like tigers and thunderstorms. Ernie is wearing a ghost costume (the bedsheet with cut out eyes) but his face is covered, so I could see why Hambet didn’t realize it was Ernie.
So we had a little chat about how they’re just putting on a play, that it was Ernie in the costume and that Telly was just pretending to be frightened, and we have had two nights free of ghosts and monsters.
I am just kicking myself because I know I have to be attentive to what Hambet is seeing, I know little kids don’t see things the same way we do, and I still missed this. Oh well, it’s not the end of the world, and Hambet doesn’t seem to be scarred for life. I have shelved a lot of our potentially scarier home media (most purchased for me before Hambet was born; I love animated movies) and I’ll be looking for gentler stories for evenings when we want to cuddle up and see a video together. (I’m thinking Veggies and Winnie-the-Pooh; more suggestions welcome….)
It is interesting that we’ve been reading this book for months and this only came up now. A friend of mine observed that stories that don’t bother her three-year-old son will really affect her five-year-old son, and she thinks it’s because her older boy just understands more. And I think the same is true for Hambet. Just in the last three months he’s been doing so much more imaginative and pretend play, and it would stand to reason that if he’s making up his own stories, he’s also taking in more and understanding more of the stories he reads.

6 comments

  2. Amalia is quite smitten with Little Bear. It is pretty painful for adults, but it is good for toddlers. Little Bear seems to live in a world completely without original sin. The most trouble he gets into involves carelessness rather than thoughtlessness or malice, and Mother Bear is very forgiving.
    It is boring as all get up, but it is nicely drawn (if you overlook the strange way the bears’ paws are drawn), with pleasant watercolor backgrounds and soothing semi-classical music. The Canadian accents drive me nuts, but that is a personal thing.

  3. For my money the most annoying things about today’s children’s entertainment is that it often attempts therapeutic treatment of problems my kids don’t have, so it models for them the very behaviour its trying to counter. For example, “Here’s what to do when you’re afraid of monsters at night.” Well, there are no monsters here because St. Michael and his buddies kick the living sh*t out of them and send them back to Hell where they belong. Yet after a therapy session with Sesame Street (hypothetically) or some such excrement which models “there are monsters here at night, I should be scared”, we get elements of the modeled behaviour.
    Aside from our beloved Wiggles and a few others, kids’ entertainment is just needed therapy for day-care victims.

  5. Pansy,
    Don’t be too hard on the Wiggles. After all, how can guys who have friends like Capt. Feathersword be that bad. We are actually going to see them live next month. I am probably more excited than Amalia.

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