Cheli Sinclair

Reminder for recovering “good girls:” 1. You can stand up for yourself and let someone know you won’t tolerate certain behaviors. 2. When someone is rude, you don’t need to laugh it off or pretend it’s ok. 3. “I don’t find that funny” lets people know that joke didn’t work for you. 4. You’re not too sensitive because you express how you feel. 5. If someone doesn’t accept your answer, it’s not a cue to keep explaining. It’s a sign they don’t respect boundaries.

"Good girl" conditioning is messaging we receive beginning in childhood to be: agreeable, polite, and nice. HERE'S WHAT IT IS:

I just feel really uncomfortable with stuff like Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel & Gretel, Snow White, Cinderella, Red Riding Hood etc. where there’s child abuse, threats to babies, violence/death as a positive outcome for “baddies”… without what I would label a justifiable payoff. 5/?

On the other hand, I do see a value in teaching him these stories at some point due to their ubiquity as a reference in Western art, literature and culture. But again, he’s 3. It’s not like there are *zero* villains or threats of violence in his books (think The Gruffalo). 4/?

I hate how many of the old stories feature parental figures as villains, and of the rest how many involve a vulnerable character getting hurt/abused/killed or at least the threat of same. To top things off, I don’t think the so-called “morals” tend to be entirely sound. 3/?

He’s a very sweet, empathetic child, and he gets upset when characters are mean to each other. I’ve just sort of been working from the basis that life is long and there’s plenty of time to learn about murder, violence, torture, betrayal etc. 2/?

Open question for the under-40s of Twitter: Are my husband and I the only millennial parents who just can’t seem to bring ourselves to expose our 3 year old to most of the “traditional” (Grimms and the like) fairy tales? 1/2