Then you had a lousy teacher, but that doesn’t make it a lousy book. You could have had a real conversation about the book at that age–you were clearly ready. Kids can think, and adults do them no favors by helping them avoid it.
Thanks–I actually teach second grade! 
Daniel
I’ve loved this book ever since I bought it to read to my a daughter.
About ten years ago, I was invited to read it at a “Read to the Kids” night at a local elementary school. The audience was a group of 1st through 5th graders. When I got done, I asked the kids what they thought of the book. On little kid raised his hand and said “that tree is a good mommy”.
You see what you read in it - I think the more you think about it, the more negative it feels.
Malthus, I didn’t think you could outdo your first posting on the meaning of the book, but you managed to equal it. Well done.
I find the book moving, sad, disturbing, and that’s why I like it. It’s supposed to unsettle you, to make you think about it again when you’re not actually reading the book or even thinking about the storyline, and make you reflect: am I being the boy? Or the tree? Is that good? What does it mean?
Not all “children’s books” are “cute stories”. Certainly not some of the best ones. I still remember sobbing in disbelief and speed reading through the rest of the ending of Charlotte’s Web after the very terse, almost cold description of her passing.
She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash… No one was with her when she died.
And that was the end of the chapter! No way could the author, so warm and sympathetic to the character all along, just… write her out… like that! I didn’t think in those terms as a 9 year old, but that’s what the feeling was. And I’ve thought about that passage, that feeling, many times over the years. I’ve seen people I loved pass away. And I understand it now. Life is not about dying. It is about living. And Charlotte lived.
Same thing with the Giving Tree, in a different way. I think about that story now and then, and always because something recalls the feeling of the book, not the events. And that’s a lesson learned in the heart.
PS - I also find The Rainbow Fish completely repellent, because it doesn’t present any ambiguity. It’s pretty clear from the narrative that you’re supposed to “learn a lesson” from the fish that you should repay envy with dissipation, and equate materialistic cronyism with friendship. :dubious:
I thought I’d add that my wife doesn’t care for The Giving Tree, and also doesn’t “get” another of my favorite childhood books, The Little Prince. There again, it is not the events of the storyline that illuminate, but the emotional lesson learned. When you get down to it, the key sub-story is about the Prince learning about love from the Fox, and realizing he loves his flower, a rose he had been tending on his faraway home planet and that he left behind to see the universe.
Huh? A talking fox, and a talking flower? WTH? Reading that synopsis it sounds trite and stupid. But the emotional lesson learned is one that I felt very deeply. It is not a terrible exaggeration to say that I eventually studied French just to read it in its original language.
<<On ne voit qu’avec le coeur,>> fit le Renard. <<L’essentiel est invisible aux yeux.>>
Robardin, I agree with you about books like Charlotte’s Web. The books that I liked best and remember most fondly were the ones that made me think, but they were often also the ones that were the hardest to read. I think my parents thought there was something wrong with me sometimes, that I spent so much time reading and ended up so sad about so many books.
It still happens now; books with an easy lesson where I know exactly what the author wants me to think are never the ones that stick.
I viewed it as a demonstration of true altruism. I mean, really, what does the tree get from the boy beyond just the sense of happiness of being a part of his life, essential in the attainment of his own goals, and an object of his attention? The tree definitely doesn’t get anything tangible from him, and for most of his life he doesn’t truly appreciate what the tree has to offer.
It reminds me of many situations in our own lives. How is the tree’s sacrifice any different than that of someone who spends years going to school, studying, staying in poverty to learn a craft that will never make him/her rich or even stable in life? Obviously if they pursue the dream its for the sake of the dream itself, its for accomplishing it and seeing it to fruition. The tree wants to make the boy happy, and in that regard it does an excellent job. I believe that people who think the tree is getting the shaft are looking at ‘giving’ in terms of quid pro quo; the tree doesn’t seem to be getting some ‘equivalent’ in return because what the tree gets out of the whole exchange is so abstract.
Another way I look at it (from the boy’s point of view) is how many people start with a sense of entitlement, but as (some, anyway) people mature, gradually they see the effort other people put forth to make their dreams come true. The boy only found this out when he was an old man. I myself remember how hard my mom worked to make sure that, even when she was a single mom scraping by, our own standard of living didn’t change. I wasn’t aware of it at the time but when I was older I really saw and appreciated how hard she worked to make us happy. She, much like the tree, only really wanted our happiness; what she had to sacrifice to get it didn’t matter.
Note: Her ending, anyway, was a good one- after her two boys had grown and didn’t need to chop pieces out of her (checkbook) to build their boats and houses she has now been spending her days making herself happy. And I, as the boy in the story, am happy for her
I hate this book so much. I never read it as a kid, and I’m glad I never did because it would have scared me and made me really upset.
When I did read it as an adult, it made me sad, because it reminded me of my teens and early twenties, when I had a series of very one-sided friendships and relationships where all I wanted was for the other person to like me, to the point where I gave and gave until I was empty inside, and then they took off and left me alone – until they needed me again.
To me, it’s a story about someone who loves a bad, selfish pig of a person so much that they let them use them to death. I don’t WANT anyone to love me that much. If I thought that my parents loved me that much, I could never leave the house and never grow up and be on my own…because they wouldn’t be okay without me. What kind of thing is that to tell a little kid?
The truth? Relationships are hardly ever equal. It sucks but there you go. This is especially true between generations: your parents probably do love you more than you love them, if love means “worry about and sacrifice for”. If it’s anything like a normal family, you’ll never repay everything they’ve done for you–it’s simply impossible to balance the books. I don’t have kids, but I see this every year with my students–I work so hard for them, and there have been a few over the years that I have made tremendous sacrifices for–kids who didn’t have a parent willing or able to make those sacrifices–and they will never know or really be properly grateful about all that I’ve done, and it hurts when they leave. This realization can do two things–it can make you bitter (and I see parents and teachers both where this happens) or it can make you humble, when you realize all the gifts you carelessly accepted in your own youth. I try for humble.
I think a major exception to this is romantic relationships. Those have to be balanced because they aren’t setting you up for the next step, they are the final step. But even then, it’s never going to be equal all the time. There have been years when all my energy and attention was focused outside the relationship, and my spouse was taken for granted–and viceversa. It’s only from an Olympian hight that it’s equal, and perhaps the practice both giving and receiving what we don’t deserve has better prepared us to live with the transient inequities of the relationship.
As far as sharing all this with a kid, my mom certainly started the process of teaching me these things when I was 4 or 5. I don’t even remember if we read “The Giving Tree”, but we watched “Ol’ Yeller” and “Charlotte’s Web” and I cried and demanded to know why it had to be that way and we talked about it. It was not fun, but it was moving, and it was important. Teaching kids how to think about the complicated and sad parts of life is as important as teaching them to brush their teeth or load a dishwasher, and art–including children’s art–helps to do that. You don’t push them past what they can handle, but you do help them handle what they can.
I’m ambivalent. I loved this book as a child, but was still sad when the tree got chopped. I really didn’t care for this book as a mother or an adult, but my kids didn’t seem to love it, so it didn’t matter.
Even as a kid, I knew that from little acorns big trees grow. My beef with this book then and now is this: the tree acts like a tree and has all the characteristics of a tree except one–no seeds. I would have liked this story much more (and encouraged my kids to read it) if the book had the boy (now a man) sow the tree’s seeds. It’s not enough for one boy to benefit from one tree–he should plant other trees to help other boys.
And then I think that Freud would have had a field day with my head and I shut up…
I don’t like it.
No one person can be another person’s total happiness. And nobody should ever expect that.
I am grateful that my mother sacrificed so much for me when I was growing up.
But I cannot be the only thing in this world that makes her happy.
In real life the giving tree doesn’t end up happy in the end, she ends up on Prozac, crying, maybe alcoholic.
The story horrifies me. I have someone in my family like that, “cut off my arms if it helps you,” and she’s not happy, she’s miserable. It’s called an enabler and it’s an abusive relationship. And to think that maybe parents feel that about their kids…it makes me want to have us all go the path of A Brave New World and never have the parent/kid relationship again. That’s how skeevy the story is to me. But I don’t agree at all that’s how parents feel. Good parents do get rewards, hopefully well before the child is old, and I never felt good parents need to give up everything for their kids forever - just when the kid is young enough to need it.
Another thing I notice upon a re-read is the boy is never happy. Not even when he returns. He just comes because he seems to have no other choice and no place to go.
Classic enabler story.
Indeed, I too am horrified. The most horrifying thing about it is that, unlike the over the top horror of a morality story like, say, the classic German children’s book Struwwelpeter, one can easily picture people we know – maybe our very own parents, or ourselves in a parental role – behaving like either the tree or the child at various points in their life. Rarely will it be someone who’s like that all the time, and not always with the same person or to the same degree. But the story is disturbing exactly because it “rings true”.
That’s why I like it. To me, it’s the “made you think” kind of unsettling that Socrates loved to do, rather than the “grossed you out” or “pushed your buttons” kind of unsettling.
This expresses one of the things I felt about it too…the story seems to imply that meeting your needs and caring for you as a kid sucks all the juice out of your parents forever, and that seems ridiculous to me. When the child is old enough, they can and should give back (and in more ways than just letting the parent just bask in their glorious presence, too :rolleyes: ) My parents do care about me and support me a lot but they have interests and lives outside of me and my sister. We haven’t left them as dead stumps, and telling a kid that that’s what they’re going to do to their parents – and that, if they did, their parents would be happy about it out of some demented all-giving ‘love’ – is cruel and inaccurate.
The ending felt forced. I think the natural conclusion would entail the conversion of the stump into a coffin.
There are many, many great parents who don’t feel like this at all.
Take me, for example. Excellent parent. (;)) But if my kid ended up “taking” in this fashion from me (or trying to) he’d be cut off. There is something that makes me much happier than “being with” my kid, and that’s seeing my kid become an excellent human being. Me “giving him everything I have to give” wouldn’t, in most foreseeable circumstances, help him be an excellent human being–in fact would be likely to hinder him from that goal.
This has almost nothing to do with the story of The Giving Tree. Of course almost any parent would give their kids the last food without even thinking about it. But that’s not what the tree is doing. She’s not sacrificing her life for his, giving up her basic necessities for his basic necessities. She’s giving up her basic necessity for his mere wants and whims. It is hard for me to imagine a situation in which that would be an admirable thing for a parent to do.
Oh shit, how did this happen?!
I swear on the grave of Jesus Christ that this was on the front page of Cafe Society.
I DID NOT DO THIS THING! I AM NO NECROMANCER!
I think this was my first thread here. Neat to be around long enough to have my very own necro.
There’s another, new thread on The Giving Tree with a link to this one:
So…blame Marley23 for it. 