Bluebird Singing in the Dead of Night

I recorded “The Diary of Anne Frank” on the DVR in the main living room this last week. My thought was that I hadn’t seen it in a long time, and it might be worth watching before our spring trip to The Netherlands.

Little did I think of the fact that Big A might stumble on it and start watching it.

Oooops.

Here’s the rub with a nearly-10-year-old girl in this day and age…she has only read the “children’s book” version of the diary. She knew about Nazis and the hiding and stuff, she just didn’t really need to know much more than that. But this viewing of the first part of the movie raised a lot of questions in her head, because maybe things weren’t so great and hopeful after all. She asked P a bunch of questions, but she wants to see the rest of it, etc.

Here’s the thing…she is going to go to Anne Frank’s house in a few months. She’s also going to learn a ton of stuff about a lot of things that are just part of the history of central Europe. It ain’t all tulips. But, suddenly, I realized, what better of an introduction to some of those things than 1950s movies for a 10 year old? Yes, yes, it’s all sanitized and basic, but it sanitized and basic to almost the perfect pitch. There is a lot more too it, of course, but she doesn’t need it or want it much more than movie goers in 1959 America wanted it.

So we’ll watch it with her. It will scare her, shock her, make her sad…all the stuff the movies do…but if you or I watch it, you think, “Ummmm, it was worse than that.” She doesn’t need to know that right now. Just a couple of years she will read the source material for herself if she wants to read it.

This falls into that weird area of the fact we have to treat her a little more “mature” on some things because of the information age. I mean, when I was 10, it meant going to a encyclopedia published in 1970…she has the freaking internet. But the trick is to keep here satified that she is learning, without feeling like she has to go digging to the interenet for every piece of information out there. That might not make sense, but I hope it does.

As long as she’s got the 1950s model of basic knowlege about the world before about 1960, we’re good to go.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 1:15 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.