By William M. Dowd
I was perusing the kids’ book section of a local BJ”s Wholesale Club store the other day, wondering what I might pick up for the grandkids until some of the Harry Potter hysteria subsided and I could get a copy of his latest adventure.
All the usual items were there — coloring books, kids’ encyclopedias, puzzle collections. But my eye kept going back to one startling title:
“Everyone Poops.”
Today’s kids don’t get much chance to figure things out for themselves. When you regulate their play times and their games, swaddle them in helmets, kneepads and bubble wrap before they get on anything with wheels, let them spend untold hours wiggling their thumbs over video game controls and otherwise experience a very unreal life, maybe they do need a book to explain to them that all living things excrete waste.
Kids of my generation somehow figured it out without the printed word lighting their path to enlightenment. A little personal experience plus a casual glance at pets and other animals pretty much took care of the lesson.
Something else they tended to learn on their own very early is that there’s nearly always someone telling you that you need things you really don’t — and they usually learned to keep their money in their pocket.
“The Complete My Body Science Series” appears to me to be one of those gotta-get-it things being foisted off on a public that would rather not do much of its own thinking. Not only will it inform your kids that eveyone poops, they’ll also be enlightened by books about the intricacies of such things as flatulence (“The Gas We Pass”), the scar tissue left by removal of the umbilical cord (“Contemplating Your Belly Button”) and healing (“All About Scabs”).
Ain’t education a wonderful thing?
(Posted 07/23/07)
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