The one where I expose my son to all manner of inappropriate things…

By Preschool Mom

As parents, we try to shield our children from things that are scary and age-inappropriate. We don’t always get it right, for example the time my husband let our son watch Ghostbusters, and we dealt with ghost sightings around the house for a week! But as a general rule we try to keep him away from bad language, scary images or things that are just not right for a four-year-old. Recently, I’ve managed to expose our son to all kinds of things that are not really age appropriate, but are rather funny in the retelling at least.

My oldest is currently fascinated by “old” things. I truly have no clue where this is coming from, but as I am a huge history fan I am pretty excited about this phase. He likes to look at my “old” books, one of which is an encyclopedia of mythology, a lovely illustrated look at Greek, Celtic and Norse myths. I didn’t think anything about this until he asked me to read the book with him.

 A few pages in I realized my mistake. While looking at a painting of some goddess or other he looked at me with this total little boy grin and said, “She doesn’t have any clothes on.” Oh great – here we go. “Why doesn’t she have any clothes on?” My not-so-bad response, “Because they dressed differently a long time ago and sometimes didn’t wear clothes.” His response to that, with said naughty grin, “She has a butt!” And close book…yikes! After this exchange I managed to convince him we should look at another book about old things and brought in one about the Wright brothers first flight. In this book everyone had their clothes ON!

Now I know that the folks in the paintings are classical figures and should not be twittered over, but try explaining that to a four-year-old. I also know that there is nothing sexual in his glee over the “naked” pictures, to him it is just funny to say the word “butt.” However, it just seemed wildly inappropriate to continue looking at the book when the lack of clothing seemed to be the biggest draw. 

I thought we had fulfilled our somewhat inappropriate book quota for the day, but later he brought me several Little Golden Books to read. One of them was The Owl and the Pussycat. I was not familiar with this Edward Lear poem, so I started to read without knowing the text. I felt like a total 5^th grader when it got to the part where the Owl professes his love to the Pussycat and I burst out in giggles. I

am a thirtysomething married woman who probably didn’t even know there was an alternative meaning to the word “pussy” until I was in high school, but I was completely shocked to see it there in print. The poem is from the 1870s, so obviously they didn’t have that particular slang term, but when on the very next page of the book it started talking about the “bong-tree” I’d reached my limit and burst out laughing.

My son looked at me with total innocence and wanted to know why mommy was laughing.  Not only was I NOT going to explain the humor to him, I also wasn’t prepared to explain to him that mommy was really just being extremely immature. So instead I changed “Pussy Cat” to “Kitty Cat” and managed to make it through the rest of the book.

The moral of the story here seems to be that no matter how hard you try, there are just some things you can’t shield your kids from.  And honestly that is probably a good thing. After all, he has to learn how to respond appropriately to things he is likely to encounter (actually maybe I do too) and he won’t be able to do that if we aren’t there to help him understand. Oh and as for our copy of The Owl and the Pussycat, well that just might make it into the donation pile for the thrift store. There are limits to what I can handle…