though I keep this from my children

on history for preschoolers, Christmas, and the 'world war'

My eldest, age 4, wants to go to Bethlehem. He’s been asking lots of questions lately. Is Santa real? Why did people want to kill baby Jesus? Why do people bomb children? Why are there so many police at protests?

When I was an undergraduate, a lecturer shared that he’d been wondering when to read his daughter the Diary of Anne Frank. He decided 8 was too young. This was 2007. Now, we have books about Anne Frank written for preschoolers. The Little People Big Dreams™ series, in the window of every bougie baby shop, introduces toddlers to the lives of the ‘little heroes’ of history. At first glance, they seem like a corrective to ‘great men’ histories. Though they recently released a book about King Charles, they tend to focus on women and people of colour who are, uncomfortably, portrayed as lifelong children. The message of these books is that ‘little people’ can change history and so, by extension, the little people you’re reading them to can too.

I hate these books, though my son tends to gravitate to them at our local library. To make all their subjects plucky little guys, they exist in a world where power structures are flat. Gandhi’s Satyagraha becomes equivalent to King Charles’ environmental ‘activism’ (if that is what we can call Duchy Organics). The endings are always happy. Anne Frank might have been murdered by Nazis, but we sidestep that to celebrate people reading her diary ‘all over the world’. There is no fascism, no colonialism, no decades of futile, grinding resistance. Just nasty baddies and brave little dreamers. The moral arc of the Little People Big Dreams universe is short and it bends towards justice.

Hitler was ‘ugly’

Poet Maggie Smith always knows when there’s been a massacre because she wakes up to thousands of notifications that people have been sharing her poem, Good Bones. “Life is short, though I keep this from my children… for every loved child, a child broken, bagged, drowned in a lake.” It’s instinctive, I guess, that when we witness horror we think about how to protect our children from it, even epistemically. Smith writes about how desperately we want this world, which after all we brought our kids into, to be good enough for them. “though I keep this from my children, I am trying to sell them the world… You could make this place beautiful, right?”

I try to take my childrearing advice from Janet Landsbury, with a dash of Shulamith Firestone. I don’t think we respect children by keeping things from them, though I’ve yet to work out ‘age-appropriate ways’ to explain a genocide. So many of my closest parent-friends want to keep the world good for their children for as long as possible, and I wonder if that’s what I should be doing, too. But then I think about the children who don’t have the luxury of ever believing that police are at protests to keep us safe. There is such privilege in getting to choose when my small sons will see the world for what it is.

But how do you package ambiguity, and un-endings for people whose worldview is part make-believe, and for whom all stories and situations require immediate resolution. People who can’t wait 30 seconds for you to unzip their coat or to open an advent calendar. Perhaps the Little People Big Dreams books aren’t history so much as historically inspired fairy tales with beautiful queens, ugly villains, and happy endings. This is, after all, the way young minds work. My four-year-old asks me most days if the ‘world war’ (which is what he calls the genocide) is over yet. It must be, because we marched? As a corrective to the playschool nativity - told with wonky knitted shepherds and wooden-bobbin angels - I’ve told him the version of the Christmas story that takes place in Palestine, where the holy family are refugees. It’s muddled in his mind and so, when the world war is over, we can go to Bethlehem. Santa will be there too.

I love the icons that Kelly Latimore draws, using West Bank families as her models

I press on, slowly introducing a world that is both magical and awful. We have a ceasefire sign in our front window, framed by our Christmas tree. My kids will wake up on Christmas morning to their (much requested) bubble shooters, and other children, loved children, will be broken, bagged. Though I keep this (at least some of this) from my children.