Do you think that it is bad for young children to read depressing/tragic stories or watch depressing/tragic movies? I’m referring mainly to its effect on emotions, worldview, attitudes, psychological development, etc.
I don’t think they should be exposed to it all the time, but such things are a part of life and the kid will have to learn about them eventually. Introduction via fiction enables the kid to find out about these things and deal with them BEFORE confronting them in real life and, if handled properly, will probably result in a person better prepared for the real world than otherwise.
If you don’t want them to be sad or depressed or ever in pain or confused or tormented, just don’t have them at all. The absolute worst thing you can do to a kid is have them.
It might also be the best, some might argue. But not me.
We always read to our daughter before bedtime. From the day she came home from the hospital.
When she was 8 years old, we read The Call of the Wild. I would read until I couldn’t see because of the tears, then she would read. And we would pass the book back and forth. This was 25 years ago. We both still remember this event. It was a good experience for both of us.
How young are you talking about?
I wonder myself about teens. My daughter’s Summer reading list was DEPRESSING. She is fifteen. Her friends all have teenage angst in some degree - ranging from normal teenager volitilty to cutting and self harm. And what do you have them read…Beloved, Grapes of Wrath, The Bell Jar, The Sound and the Fury…
All the depressing, gloomy stories turned me away from reading fiction to reading magazines and science fiction. They also made me not like English classes to a large extent, although I did well in those classes after 7th grade.
The gloomy stories I remember included two about boys’ beloved horses that died. One last scene was of the skinned horse rotting in the dump as the family rode by in a wagon. Another story was about leaving old useless people in the woods to die.
I realize life isn’t all cake and ice cream, but I also believe many people already have enough doom and gloom in their lives without school piling it on.
“Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey”
G.K. Chesterton.
I’m sure most of my generation recalls the episode of Sesame Street where Mr. Hooper dies. I think they handled it perfectly, without just recasting the character, or pretending he went somewhere else. Kids can handle sorrow better than you might think. The more you hide it from them, the worse it will be later on down the line. I’m not saying deliberately read them the most depressing thing you can find, but don’t shield them from everything gloomy in life.
A young kid’s first exposure to death should probably not be a depressing movie. It’s amazing how confusing the concept of death is to someone who had no idea such a thing was even possible. Man did my heart break when my then 4 year old first realized I would one day die and so would he. It was just very overwhelming.
Small kids don’t tend to even understand fully the things that bother adults, that is why they call them adult fears.
I have never seen a child focus on what adults would find depressing in lit, they often seize on things adults would not give a second thought to.
Personally, I think exposure to supernatural literature (vampires, zombies) or Rapture-related (Left Behind) series is more damaging than depressing literature or speculative fiction/alternative history. A good example is the Slenderman attempted murder in Wisconsin, where two young teens tried to kill a classmate to please a supernatural “being.” I might be drawing too fine a line here, but there’s a difference between morbid wallowing (some of Jodi Picoult’s novels, A Child Called It, and sequels) and quality literature (the Brontes, Thomas Hardy, et. al.)
I was really into depressing books as a child. One of my favorite authors was Lurlene McDaniel, who wrote young adult books about teenage girls who all had horrible diseases. At least one of them always died by the end, often more than one. Usually it was cancer, but sometimes it would be AIDS, or cystic fibrosis, or she’d have all the girls go away to camp and be sick together and date boys with severe hemophilia. I loved nothing more than books about death and disease and catastrophe and natural disasters and had a steady diet of it from about ages 9-17.
My parents were very strict with what we were allowed to see on TV but didn’t believe in censoring books so my reading choices usually just got an eyeroll. When I was 11 or 12, I picked up “Go Ask Alice” at the library and my mom uncharacteristically commented that I could read it if I wanted but she wished I’d wait until I was a bit older. Since she’d never done that before, I put it back (when I did read it a few years later, I understood why).
I do think it may not have been the greatest diet of reading and it probably made me more pessimistic and cynical than I might otherwise have been. But that’s sort of a chicken and egg kind of question–did I become cynical and pessimistic because of all those books or did I pick up those books because I was by nature cynical and pessimistic?
Edit: And on the flip side, I picked up a lot of historical knowledge. For awhile I was fascinated with the Titanic, then the Holocaust, then the Romanovs and their messy end, then the Black Death, then the 1918 pandemic, and so on.
I guess it depends. My mother was taken to see “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” as a young girl (how old? I don’t recall, but the film was released when she was 7: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - Wikipedia) and had nightmares about it even into old age.
On the other side, one of my grandsons started reading Harry Potter when he was 7. His parents didn’t want him to read the later books, where things started getting darker, until he was older. But they couldn’t stop him and he had finished it by the time he was 9. He is now 13 and it doesn’t seem to have done him any harm.
I don’t think it’s good for children or adults to read a steady diet of only depressing literature. But I don’t think it’s good to avoid it altogether, either. People die, evil exists, bad things happen, and if a child—or adult—can vicariously experience these things—and the way characters more or less successfully deal with them—in fiction, they’ll be better equipped to handle them in real life.
Also, not all depressing/tragic fiction is created equal. Some is ultimately life-affirming and hopeful. Some honestly acknowledges the dark side of life. Some just cynically manipulates the reader into feeling as lousy as possible.
I read 1984 as an adult and remember thinking I was glad to have swerved it as a teenager. Such a psychologically powerful book.
But that’s my response to reading it as an adult - probably as a kid I would have read it as an adventure story with an unhappy ending, but no real appreciation of its depth (even though Orwell is v accessible and often read in schools).
So I think it’s a rare book that can pack a tragic, depressing punch across all ages. The book that levelled you as an impressionable 15 you is unlikely to hold the same resonance when read as an adult, and vice verca.
My father died when I was four years old. On the whole, I would have preferred to watch a depressing movie.
With regard to the OP, I remember other young children occasionally telling me that they knew how I felt because one of their grandparents had died, which I considered pretty insensitive at the time. (I still think it’s insensitive, but as an adult I’m more understanding of the insensitivity of small children.) No one ever claimed that they knew how I felt because they’d seen a movie or read a book where someone died, though. So I think that even children of about age 4-6 get that the emotional reaction they have to the death of a character in a work of fiction is not comparable to how someone might feel about the death of a family member. I’m less certain that adults understand this.
I’ll add that I’m a lifelong lover of reading who grew up to be a librarian, and neither my own experience nor any research that I’m aware of indicates that it is psychologically harmful for children to read books where sad things happen. Being required to read books that they don’t enjoy could in some cases hurt a child’s interest in reading, but I’d guess that children are more likely to dislike a book for being too hard, too stupid, or too boring than for being too depressing.
As others in this thread have noted, it can also be difficult for an adult to predict what about a work of fiction a child might find upsetting. See for instance this AV Club Q&A about movies and TV shows that the writers found frightening as children. Some of the answers involve actual horror movies, but in other cases they were frightened as kids by cheesy gags on sitcoms. This scene from a Facts of Life episode that parodied Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None is mentioned (Blaire is moussed to death!), as is a Too Close for Comfort episode that parodied The Picture of Dorian Grey: “While seeing Ted Knight’s painted face turn increasingly haggard was disturbing enough of an image, the real shit-your-little-pants scare came when that painting suddenly started glaring at Knight with thick, down-turned eyebrows and then—horror of horrors—cracked open its mouth and started yelling at him.” But this same writer says that as a kid he loved Tales from the Darkside and the 1980s Twilight Zone series.
I think the most dangerous thing, in general, is restricting what children read except for extreme examples. Speaking as a former child, we* will *get our hands on it and read it. If it’s been forbidden or restricted, we will not talk about it with you.