From LitHub:
Like many eight-year-olds, my son Griff is deeply obsessed with the Harry Potter series. Each night before bed, we used to read about 20 pages of one of the books, and then we would spend a fair amount of time the next day talking about characters and plotlines. Griff spoke of the characters with great affection, made guesses as to what he thought would happen next, and it was nice to have something to talk about other than Pokemon Go.
His first literary crush was Hermione, which I realized only after Viktor Krum takes her to the Yule Ball in The Goblet of Fire. That same night, in the dark, Griff said to me, “Dad, I don’t really like Viktor.”
“Oh, no?” I asked, realizing what was happening.
“I don’t think he’s good enough for Hermione.”
“I guess I don’t think so either,” I told him.
These emotions died down after he became fascinated by Luna Lovegood.
For Halloween, Griff was Neville Longbottom, his favorite character, the person to whom he feels most closely connected. Incidentally, Neville is also my favorite character in the books.
Recently, however, while we were reading the opening pages of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Griff had a meltdown that caused me to question whether we could continue.
. . . .
And so Griff and I started the first book. I immediately remembered something that had up to that point seemed like a minor issue. Harry’s parents were dead. Right from the start, they were stone-cold dead. As parents do when reading books, I edited on the fly. A few pages in, I read, “The rumor is that Lily and James Potter are—are—that they’re . . . missing.”
“They’re missing?” Griff asked.
“Yes,” I told him. “I guess Harry’s parents went missing.”
“Will he find them?”
“I guess we’ll need to read and find out.”
I wish I had not done this. I wish I had talked to Griff about it and tried to decide if he wanted to keep reading. Or, maybe, I wish I had waited until he was older to read the books. But he was interested now, wanted to know how this was all going to turn out. So we moved forward. It took some doing, but I managed to get a few hundred pages into the book with only some creative editing.
One night, Griff stopped me in the middle of some random sentence and asked, “Are Harry’s parents dead?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Are they dead?” he asked again.
“Well . . . they are. Yeah, they died.”
“Voldemort killed them?” he asked.
“Yes.”
I watched him process this. As a parent, you feel like a failure more often than you feel like a success.
“Okay,” he said.
“Why did you think about that?” I asked him.
“Some kids at school told me.” Several of his friends had seen the movies or were also reading the books.
“Do you want me to keep reading?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said, though I could tell that he was still processing this new information, trying to work back through the book to figure out what he’d missed, what I’d kept from him.
Link to the rest at LitHub
*facepalm* Don’t ever lie to your kids. There are ways to present information in an age-appropriate way, but don’t ever lie. It will always come back to bite parents in the a**.
‘Editing as you go’ means this parent didn’t even read a few chapters before deciding if the book was suitable to be read aloud (a huge investment of time) to a child.
I read mine classics that I loved, and ones they chose, not things I hadn’t even vetted.
Was glad I checked when I found out that the harmless Hardy Boys of my youth had been totally destroyed by some idiot including rape, arson, and terrorists in the ‘updates.’
Alicia, this guy effed up on simply being a parent. We could spend the rest of the week listing the ways he screwed up.
But the basis was his first lie to his son. And in the sections PG didn’t excerpt, that broken trust versus his peers honesty is at the forefront of the rest of the father-son exchanges.
I was trying to be more diplomatic, but essentially yes.
My mother told me to never lie to a child.
Soften the blow where necessary (this is not changing ‘killed by Vortemort’ to ‘missing’), watch HOW you tell which children what, and when, but don’t lie. You are interpreting the world, and they will remember how you did it – especially the part you don’t want them to remember.
I know, because I remember all the times my parents did it wrong. I’ve asked MY kids, but they haven’t taken me up on the offer to tell me I really messed something up. Hope it doesn’t mean they do think I messed up but won’t tell me.
I have had to tell them hard things, and have had to apologize many times for one time I thought it was a better decision not to tell one of my children something.
You don’t get a second chance at some things.
Hey, we all make mistakes as parents. Apologizing and fixing as best as we can goes a long way to acceptance and forgiveness.
the harmless Hardy Boys of my youth had been totally destroyed by some idiot including rape, arson, and terrorists in the ‘updates.’
?!?!?!
That’s … I can’t … who would do that?! And these books are still aimed at third graders no less? Ugh.
I agree with everything else you said here. I’m just stunned; I naively thought I could introduce my brother’s kids to our childhood favorites with no trouble. Glad to know now before I made that blunder!
My oldest was 5 when my MIL died. I can’t imagine an 8 year old never having encountered death before.
People and pets die all the time.
And even if they don’t know any personally, death is one theme that is touched upon in Church.
Obviously not a person who read a lot of old-school fairy tales or children’s literature. I mean, what’s so weird about dead people being dead?
Of course, I reminisce about my parents taking us kids to funerals of people who were family friends but whom we’d never met, or of relatives we didn’t know, and from the way some people respond, you’d think that they’d committed child abuse by letting us see embalmed corpses. Sheesh.
Some kids really are very sensitive souls. Some kids are ghouls. And some kids just don’t care much about dead people, much less theoretical fictional dead people.