I was thinking about the Nursery Rhymes we learned as kids, and I was realizing how “off” they were.  They had thieves, accidents, people hitting kids, and plain old violence in them.  Yet we recited them with little to no knowledge of what we were saying.

Think about it – a boy falls down and  breaks his crown, a spider frightens a girl, and an egg cracks and that’s the end of him.  These are the calmer rhymes.

How about “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe?”  She gave her kids broth for dinner and whipped them soundly, whatever that means.  It’s raining, it’s pouring and the old man bumps his head and can’t get up in the morning. Would that be a concussion or worse?  And in keeping with the old man theme, in “Goosey, Goosey  Gander” an old man gets thrown down the stairs. Yikes!!

“The House That Jack Built” is a nightmare, with a cat killing a rat, a tattered and torn man, a forlorn maiden and a poor cow with a crumpled horn.  I didn’t know cows had horns, although I just read that some do!

And Rock A Bye Baby has to be one of the worst.  The tree limb breaks and the cradle falls. Not good. Why would a cradle be in a tree in the first place??

So after shaking my head and wondering, let’s find something positive in all this negativity.  How did we benefit from these rhymes? We did learn to memorize.  We learned how to rhyme words. We probably learned to read the rhymes in the books we had.  And chances are we colored pictures of some of these rhymes in coloring books, which helped our fine motor skills. It doesn’t sound like much, but considering the themes of these rhymes, some good did come out of all the craziness!