Where the police are looking and is it not a pity for a cat: What surprises modern children in the books that their parents read in childhood

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The favorite books of our childhood seem to be eternal - after all, more than one generation of children has grown up on them. However, children of the twenty-first century sometimes find it difficult to understand the logic of what is happening, even if they know that before there were no computers and televisions, and telephones had a tube on a spiral wire.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

While walking, Tom meets his friend Huck. Huck has a numb corpse of cats with him, and Tom is delighted with it. Then the boys are discussing how it is possible to reduce warts with the help of this corpse.

The modern child is shocked not so much by the fact that the cat is dead, but by the fact that the boys do not feel sorry for her at all. A dead cat is just an object for them. Many of today's children would find it more natural to bury a cat.

In another episode, Tom, Huck and their peer Joe smoke a pipe like real pirates. Unaccustomed to tobacco, Tom and Joe go into the bushes to "look for a knife" and Huck later finds them pale and lying. The guys in the days of Mark Twain perfectly understood that the boys vomited from nicotine poisoning (and they were ashamed to admit it), a modern child will ask what happened to them and whether they found the lost knife. In addition, he is unlikely to understand why Tom and Joe smoked for so long and persistently, if they were immediately unpleasant. Nowadays teenagers smoke less often for this very reason - why endure the unpleasant? Of course, except for guys from families where people smoke freely and smoke a lot with children, tobacco is a common thing up to an already formed addiction.

"Mishkina's porridge", Nikolay Nosov

The unnamed main character with his best friend Mishka comes to his mother's dacha, and she says that she has business in the city and they will have to live for two days without her. Then, following the instructions of their mother, the boys kindle a fire in the stove and are not very successful in trying to cook porridge.

The age of the main characters is not entirely clear. They are pioneers in most other stories, which means they are between nine and thirteen years old. The modern child is shocked that adults allow such small children to start a fire in their absence and that they are expected to be able to cook porridge. And if there is a fire? And if they do not cook, and will be hungry for two days? What if they get burned?

"Telephone", Nikolay Nosov

The main character does not understand what the button on the door jamb means. He never saw a doorbell! This device does not seem to be all that technically advanced, so the discovery that in the days when phones and batteries already existed, it was normal not to know how to use a call and not know what it looks like, shocks the children of the twenty-first century.

"Dad, Mom, Eight Children and the Truck", Anne-Katarina Westley

In the chapter where the girl Mona is pissed off by cutting her embroidery, she takes it and goes outside without asking to "run out" her anger. The parents know where she went, but how is it not to ask permission to leave the apartment? Nowadays such behavior seems to be pure fantasy to children.

The youngest of eight children, baby Morten, wears all-patch clothing. “Why not buy him second-hand clothes? Mom is probably already very busy to sew clothes from scraps”, the newest generation is surprised.

When the children notice a fire in a neighboring house, the father tells one of them to run away and call the firefighters with a special signal, which is on the street corner, and the rest - to dine all the apartments and warn about the fire. Since trucks are already driving on the streets, readers understand that this is happening in a relatively modern city, and they have a question: "How is it, not a single apartment has a telephone to call firefighters normally?"

Finally, everyone in the school knows that eight children sleep on mattresses right on the floor because they have too little room to arrange nine beds. But the police are not interested in them at all! Nobody comes to warn mom that she should take better care of the children.

"Three on the Island", Vitaly Gubarev

The mother of the protagonist reproaches that he did not wash the dishes - in front of the neighbors, they say, it is a shame. Moreover, entering the kitchen, the boy sees his elderly neighbor there. Many modern children have a real shock - how did a neighbor come in without asking for their kitchen? Why did she do this and why are they not angry at her, but on the contrary, it is expected that she has the right to be angry? In Russia, many families still live in communal apartments, but already so few that most children cannot imagine that this is possible and how exactly such a life is arranged.

The Extraordinary Adventures of Karik and Vali by Ian Larry

But little readers experience the biggest shock from the beginning of the book about Karik and Valya, who found themselves in the land of insects. In the story, two children, a boy and a girl, disappear. A police dog takes their trail and leads the police to the lonely man's apartment. There, the police find children's sandals and panties, marked with letters, and … Instead of arresting the suspicious landlord, who claims to have not seen any children, they stand and wonder where the two completely naked kids could have gone until the landlord kicks them out for a door.

It is clear that suspicions then turn out to be in vain, this is a frequent plot twist. But don't even be on your guard in such a situation? But the count can go on for minutes, the children of the twenty-first century already know this well.

But any misunderstandings are a good reason to talk to your child, so Soviet books that can be downloaded for free, the download is really worth it.