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Comment by sossles | Hacker News Reader

I've read a few older books with my kids that contained mildly questionable things, like a boy saying that girls can't do certain things, but I much prefer having that awkward conversation about how things used to be, over tossing it all out and pretending things were never any different.

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So true. I enjoy discussing parenting articles with our 8 year old.

Yesterday it was one about "yelling less and praising less" [0]. We had a great discussion about the concepts. Then some fun trying out faint praise and faint yelling.

I think discussing with kids how things used to be, and why we try and do things differently now, is super powerful - that notion of historical change helps kids think at a higher level. Yes, things were not always rosy, and they aren't even now.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/03/hunt-gath...

Not to mention we were all raised that way. It’s always a part of parenting and passing on culture. Pretending otherwise is abdicating necessary responsibility.

As someone once said about the controversy surrounding Mark Twain's books: "so there weren't any n** back then?"

Meaning that reprinting his books and replacing the n word with the more neutral "slave" risks whitewashing the terrible suffering that black slaves endured.

Also, theres a lot of presumption, thinking you can rewrite a classic author just to fit your modern sensibilities.

I agree with certain phrases and words. Sometimes I can replace them on the fly with alternatives. At the end, there is only so much you can explain and when I read a bedtime story I seriously don't want to start explaining about colonialism.

Many books have fallen out of use over the decades and one should also consider that the publishing house will probably also have an eye on protecting the unproblematic Dr. Seuss books. Over the long run racial stereotypes will hurt the Seuss brand, by deciding not to publish those, they protect the brand and the sales of the other books.

The problem is not all parents have that discussion with their kids. But those explanations can also be added to a story so that kids can understand them. I don't think it would've destroyed Seuss' legacy to change a handful of illustrations in some of his books.

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