I loved The Berenstain Bears books. I grew up with them. They are great, moral stories. Now I feel the urge to run and buy them all.
I was slightly irked to read about the negative feedback Stand Berenstain and his co-author wife received. (ok, I admit, a little more than slightly irked! I couldn't stop huffing and rolling my eyes...lol)
"Some objected to the traditional, old-fashioned family structure, with a(perhaps because they lacked that in their own upbringing, and missed out?)
bumbling woodworker father and a stay-at-home mom who finds solutions to the
problems her sweetly wayward cubs stumble into. Others found encoded political
messages in Papa Bear's lethargy."
"I hate the Berenstain Bears," columnist Charles Krauthammer fumed in 1989. "The(a wimp? Please! It takes a man of courage to take the task on of providing for his family 100%. And post-feminist offense? Give me a break!)
raging offense of the Berenstains is the post-feminist Papa Bear, the Alan Alda
of Grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like
Batman."
In 1996, Mr. Berenstain told The Washington Post: "We've gotten unkind letters(I wish I could have met this man)
complaining that we are emasculating the men in the family. The absolute truth
is that Papa Bear is based on me."
One of the Berenstains' early editors complained that the bear family's
clothing, language and general mores were several decades out of date: "It's
just not that way in the real world."(really? It's not? Because I know many like this in the real world)
(GOOD. Death I would expect possibly, but divorce- I am thankful they left it alone. They remained married, and marriage isn't meant to end in divorce. Good for them.)
"The two subjects that never entered the child's dreamland of Bear Country
were divorce and death."
May God rest his soul.
3 comments:
I grew up with those books too, but I have to admit that we haven't been too keen on giving them to our own children because it's just one more father figure that is percieved as weak and easily bossed about by the woman. We are trying to fight against the cultural tide of weakening the father's role as head of the house. I know that the author didn't have any hidden agenda in his writing, but nonetheless, we chose not to have the books in our home very often. we're weird though LOL, we don't even have any TVs.
Yea, good point. And I don't think you're weird! (friends of ours love the "Kill your Television" bumper sticker)
In the sense of degrading the role of the father/husband, I agree. I mostly remember the aspect of it being a traditional family. I liked that. Mom, Dad, kids- parents actually raising their children.
That's what I liked.
I must say I gasped when I read the headline and gasped even more when I read that article!
I think I'm going to hafta read an old Berenstein Bears book tonight...!
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