This is 21st century, now a days childhood has become a very brief period and children are getting pre adult very quickly.
There are so many examples that show a decent curtails in childhood and rushing into adult clothing and activities.Parents, teachers, everyone is trying to give the child a better atmosphere, education, thoughts than the ancient times. There should be no bad thoughts or inequality it affect their growth. This is a good thing.However, no one is thinking as to what happen when these thoughts and actions reach to their extreme, when it will try to control artistic freedom and to intrude into historical reality. In a sense they are trying to be politically correct means any description, blog or writing that can effect feelings of a particular group, that should be censored removed and it does not matter what we have to sacrifice and pay for this, that can be historical facts or innocent truths.In “let sleeping beauties lie” an article by Dorothea Israel Wolfson, the editor writes in the preface “In our choice of texts and in our introduction, we have paid close attention to ……………perception of race, class and gender, among other topics, in shaping children’s
literature and childhood itself.”These people have not left even nursery rhymes, fairy tales, cartoons that have been read and watched from a long time, suddenly they accused them of being racist as well as traumatic.The latest that is facing this condition is the evergreen cartoon series ‘tom and jerry ‘. Critics say that in some
scenes Tom and Jerry are shown smoking, so those scenes are edited as the broadcasting regulator “OF COM” who has taken decisions feels that it can encourage and glamorizes smoking in children. Some of the scenes, which show Tom and Jerry black faced after an explosion, have also been cut. Moreover, all this, when television is full of enough violence and swearing in today.Literature is said to be the mirror of society .so nursery rhymes were too written to make the child familiar with the time and conditions of that period and most of them have a story behind them .As “baa baa black sheep “deals with the problem of middle ages when tax was imposed on wool.Another famous nursery rhyme that has undergone changes is “Humpty Dumpty”. In the changed version, Humpty Dumpty no longer falls and breaks himself but has a successful conclusion.One more purpose of child literature is to convince the child that world is not full of bad things. Some beautiful things are also there, so for this purpose the writers create fairy tales .One such story is of ‘Red Riding Hood’. This is a simple story of a young girl wearing a red colored hood, and eaten by wolf for some trick. One of the interpretations of this tale says Red Riding Hood has been called a prostitute because of the red hood, which was a characteristic of a prostitute in the 17th century. The story has also been presented as an allegory for sexual awakening, where the red hood symbolizes the menstrual cycle, the forest a symbol of adulthood and the wolf a lover, seducer or sexual predator who threatens her virginity. So we can interpret these things in as many way as we want but even then if we have such a deep look its hard to reach a single conclusion. However, one thing is sure that our coming generation will be deprived of the real magic of this great and innocent literature.