alt Hacker NewsThe children’s literature that was written prior to about 1900 is generally darker, more violent and threatening than what came after. Struwwelpeter anyone?
We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it. That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”
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The other aspect to this is that children's stories were typically highly moralistic essentially telling the kids to always obey their elders, Struwwelpeter is the perfect example, but also the Grimm stories (the tales of 1001 nights maybe less so, but I might be misremembering). I'd argue that this continued well into the 20th century. That's why pipi longstockings became such a success, here is a story about a girl (even), that is super strong, independent and generally self sufficient. It gave kids their own agency which resonated with kids and I guess the time was right that parents did not forbid reading it.
An interesting anecdote, in France Pipi Longstockings was heavily censored until the 90s because it was viewed as promoting disobedience. Naturally that made it so dull that nobody wanted to read it, so French people (at least those who were children then) generally don't know pipi. I only found out about all this when we moved to Sweden and my French partner had never heard of pipi, which I couldn't believe.
> We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it.
On one hand, if we want the children to grow up into the better world, and for them to keep making it better as adults, perhaps we should set up in their minds more examples of the better world, than of the worse kind of the world. Sounds somewhat reasonable?
On the other hand, there is this "shattered assumptions theory" of psychological trauma: that such traumas are caused by the reality violently shattering one of three core assumptions, one of which is "overall benevolence of the world". So it can be argued that the more you try to shield children from the unpleasantness, the more traumatized their experience will be when they inevitably meet it; vice versa, someone's who never really assumed the world is all the benevolent ("yeah, there are nice parts of it, but you have to maintain and upkeep them") can't have that assumption shattered since he never held it.
One of the main themes of Lovecraft's work is that a man is alone in a vast, uncaring universe filled with terrible, powerful, and unknown things. Which is factually true, of course, and is not really that scary of a thought — unless you're a devout Christian who had a sudden crisis of faith, got interested in astronomy, and then lived through WWI. In this case having a benevolent God who made the world for its beloved children replaced by an empty mechanistic universe where life has sprang up mostly accidentally is indeed quite a traumatic experience. Others would those "things the man weren't meant to know" quite unpleasant, sure, but being driven to madness simply because apparently the rest of the universe doesn't revolve around humanity? Yeah, we knew that already, it's not news.
>That’s probably the Victorian era, when childhood is said to have been “invented.”
Could you elaborate on this?
> We decided at some point that these themes were no longer fit for children despite generations having been raised with it.
Yes. And we gave children Disney and television or Netflix, with only violence, with, when existing, a dumbed down plot.
Children were entering the workforce between 7 and 9 years old; in 2000 kids were entering the workforce between 14 and 18 (a lot of my friends bagged grocceries after work) in 2026 I think the average person enters the work force after 18 now, working in high school is much less common than it was 25 years ago.
TL;DR heavily moralistic stories are probably more relevant in a society where you're commuting to a factory at 9 or 12, vs modern society where your education continues into the mid 20s for many and the 5 or 6 year degree being more common than 4 these days.