Babies, lullabies, and broken bones
My good friend, and fellow Southern Standard employee, Seth Wright is well-known as a ‘Simpsons’ fan here at work, as well to most of his friends and family I would imagine. In anticipation of the ‘Simpsons’ movie, Seth recently purchased a compilation of the show’s seventh season, which came with a T-shirt rolled up to look like a donut. (Don’t ask. I have no idea why, except to say the show’s creators have some unusual marketing ideas.)
In any case, while watching one of the episodes from the hugely successful animated series something turned up that reminded me of something I have always wondered about, but never got around to addressing in a column ‘ toxic lullabies.
Now, I do recall doing a column on the rather violent and creepy nature of many of the fairy tales we read to our children as a matter of course. Stories full of sly ravenous wolves, poisoned apples, cannibalistic gingerbread bakers ‘ I mean, I’m wondering why there isn’t a video game. Of course there probably is, and I’ve just never heard of it.
But the semisweet little ditty I’m talking about for this column is called, and I’m sure you’ve all heard of it, ‘Rockabye Baby.’
Most people know this lullaby, and probably have from the time they first heard it sung to them as a child. And I’m sure we all think it’s fairly harmless, just a nice soothing tune designed to lull a kid to sleep.
But have you really ever really thought about the lyrics to this song?
Well, for the very few who may not have heard it at some point in their lives, here they are:
‘Rock a bye baby in the treetop,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.’
OK, you have to admit this is wrong on so many levels.
First of all, who the heck loads their baby up in a cradle and hauls it to the top of a tree? Michael Jackson maybe? I’ve heard he likes to hang babies out over balconies, so this would probably be right down his alley.
And it seems to me, even if you think it’s OK to leave some poor child up a tree, if the wind kicks up, you might want to get the kid down from there. What if a limb breaks or something?
Oh yeah, that’s exactly what happens in the very next line of our lullaby. Oh, and did you notice, it’s not ‘IF the bough breaks,’ it’s ‘WHEN the bough breaks.’
According to these less-than-calming lyrics, this kid is coming down, cradle and all. You have to wonder, for any child who is really paying attention, what kind of image is this putting in his or her little head? Some horrible, or at least disconcerting, picture of a baby in a cradle plummeting through the branches, bouncing off limbs hither and yon on the way down to the hard, stony ground, desperately trying to understand why mom or dad stuck them up there in the first place?
Come on folks, it’s pretty obvious they didn’t have the DCS back then. If parents had a baby stuffed in a cradle up in some treetop these days, much less if it took a plunge down to the ground, let’s face it, they’d be filling out papers and filing in and out of court for months on end. And rightly so.
In any case, you might want to give all this some thought the next time you decide to croon this particular lullaby to your smiling child when they’re snug in their beds and you want to soothe them into a restful sleep.
After all, they might actually be listening.
Charlie Johnson is new editor of the Standard. He can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].