American Girl

Dutch has been plowing through the American Girls books lately. She's now reading the series about a girl who is a slave during the Civil War. This has prompted many questions and triggered a wave of pretending-to-be-a-slave games. I feel squeamish about this, frankly. This evening, I was outside pinning strawberry runners after dinner, and the girls were playing nearby, and Dutch came running over to me and said "You're the slave owner! Here's your glass of warm milk!" and then ran away. And ... I don't know. My privileged white daughter, living a slightly precarious but really very comfortable middle-class life, pretending to be an African-American slave. And enjoying it, because it's fun to pretend that you're suffering (she often pretends she's in an orphanage where she is harshly treated, etc.) when you're not actually suffering and see no possibility that you might ever suffer anything worse than being made to stop playing and go to bed. When I was 9, I would pretend that I was a slave when I had to do the extremely arduous task of raking the grass clippings on the lawn.*

I try to remind her that slavery isn't a fun thing, and she says "I KNOW, Mom. I'm just PRETENDING." I thought maybe getting her some books would help her get a more grounded understanding of slavery, so I rummaged around at the library and picked up some books, including a not-very-riveting picture book about Frederick Douglass. She's interested, and has devoured quite of bit of reading on the topic. However, the other day, she said "Mom! I read about this guy, Something-Something-Box Brown! He escaped from slavery by being mailed in a box!" and I said "Yeah, isn't that an amazing story?" and she said "Isn't that funny! He was mailed in a package!" and I tried to talk about how uncomfortable and painful that must have been, and scary, etc., but she was too tickled about the idea of mailing yourself! In a BOX! to think beyond that.

Anyway. She's six. She's going to pretend stuff. There's nothing wrong with it, and I'm just going to overlook the ick factor and try not to drown her in tedious books that kill her interest (though that seems impossible; she's soaking up as much information as possible about absolutely EVERYTHING right now.). I have made it clear to her that I refuse to participate in the games, though. I do a pretty good evil witch, but there's absolutely no way I'm going to pretend to be a slave owner. Agh. Do I have to ask her not to play this game** at school? Why don't parenting books ever cover this kind of thing?

*And sometimes when I had cottage cheese, I would pretend I was very poor and I really lived in a cottage and this was all I got to eat ALL DAY, and I would spend an hour eating it extremely slowly. I didn't have very many friends.

** She's been reading a book of children's rhymes that includes several cruelty-to-teachers ditties, including the "Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school" rhyme that I remember from my childhood. She thought it was completely hilarious, but I asked her not to repeat it at school, given the amount of school violence that has taken place since my ancient childhood.