A couple of times a week, I watch silly toddler You Tube videos with my daughter. Letting her satisfy her laptop curiosity once or twice a week is enough to keep her dirty peanut-butter hands off it the rest of the time. So we watch videos of owls, cats, and pandas mostly. But one day we discovered this, and I had to close it immediately because it was so crazy in a really scary computer-Internet kind of way:
This got me to thinking, what the hell are our kids singing about? Ashes? Ashes? We all fall down?? It’s bizarre to watch your sweet baby singing about ashes and death. She doesn’t even know that scrambled eggs aren’t people (she literally says “good morning, eggs!”).
Below is a breakdown of where those rhymes you’ve been singing for what seems like an eternity originated. Think of it as a good way to start teaching your child to appreciate history. If you live in Manhattan, this is very important because four-year-olds are required to recite 16th-century British history while juggling in order to get into a good kindergarten.
Three Blind Mice:
The same lady who cuts off mice tails in this rhyme is also Bloody Mary! This song is based on Queen Mary the 1st‘s rule of England. She hated Protestants because she was Catholic. So she burnt them (clever). Now we sing about burning Protestants to 6-month old infants at library sing-alongs.
Violent Lady Your Kid Sings About Everyday
Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
OK, so more Protestant death. This one too is about Protestant torture, guillotines, and more burning at the stake by Bloody Mary.
Ring O Ring of Rosies:
This one is about the bubonic plague in London. My daughter LOVES this rhyme, but she’s singing about circular skin rashes (Ring O’ Roses), the cremation of dead bodies, and ye old Englishman’s ignorant medical remedy of choice: Posies.
Jack and Jill
The French Reign of Terror in 1793 and the be-heading of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. A lot of people lost a lot of heads and somehow our children are still talking and thinking about it, broken crowns and all.
I think this says something about violence in our culture starting at an extremely young age, but I’m way too busy changing shitty diapers to really delve into it right now. I’ll just leave it to the child-violence experts.
