Why I don't Like Chester and the Big Bad Bully

I'm all about children's books that promote kindness and tolerance for everyone and, on the first several readings, I really liked Chester and the Big Bad Bully.  As time went on, though, I began to resent that book and the terrible lesson it taught my child.

Now, anyone who has ever read the book is probably wondering at this point what in the world I am talking about.  This whole series of books about Chester the Raccoon are promoted in schools for their value lessons, so how can I say it taught my child something wrong?  You might be picking up your child's copy right now and looking through the book to find anything amoral in it.  You could do this and you wouldn't find a thing.

That's because the terrible lesson this book taught my child was not amoral or unkind...it was the opposite: a saccharine-sweet, totally unrealistically optimistic lesson that will inevitably lead to pain and misery...

"If you are nice to a bad person, it will make them good"

Now, when's the last time you went out of your way to be kind to someone who had taken a dislike to you and had your kindness change their attitude?  Oh, it may work every once in a while but those exceptional occurrences are more often the result of a myraid of circumstances, your kindness being only a small factor in the change.

So, yes, the lesson taught by Chester and the Big Bad Bully is inconsistently true at best, at least when dealing with the human world...but the characters in the book are animals. They are anthropomorphized animals but animals none-the-less, which means, at least for my literal-minded J-Rex, that she has taken this lesson and attempted to apply it theoretically to the world of wild animals.

Do you see where I'm going with this? Yes, the J-Rex, as a result of this one children's book, has managed to convince herself that, should she ever meet a wild tiger or other predator that occasionally munches on human flesh, she could simply be kind and convince it to abandon all of it's protective and predatory instincts and become "nice." I can tell you, I'm not planning on taking her to explore the Amazon or the plains of Africa anytime soon!

Of course, I have attempted to disabuse the J-Rex of the idea that all "bad guys" can be turned into "good guys" if only we show them enough kindness, but I hate doing it because I value the naivety of childhood and, in many ways, wish I had held onto my own a bit longer than I did.  It would be a lot easier if the stories we told are children were more like The Song of the Coyote (one of our favorites), where the ways of nature are explained gently but with some sense of realism: Yes, unfair things happen,  but part of life is learning how to move on.  No, we can't make the mountain lion not want to kill the coyotes just by being nice to it, but we can learn to be cautious around danger.  That's the message I want the J-Rex to learn from the things she reads, not the misinformed, heartbreaking idealism of Chester and his easily malleable bullies.