I Read Orwell To My Elementary Kids
When are kids ready for difficult stories?
I’ve written often that we do children a disservice by always kid-ifying everything in their world. I’ve taken my children to Shakespeare plays, adult yoga classes, naturalist tours of ancient islands. All of these experiences are not typically considered “for kids” but there’s nothing inappropriate about them for children. Adults just assume kids won’t like these activities.
But children can grow so much more in the richness of the real world than in a dumbed down, kid-version of it.
What about stories?
When is the right time to introduce our children to the hardships depicted in literature?
In history, I glossed over the Spanish Inquisition, and I’m not going to describe the Holocaust in any detail until high school. While both are undeniably important events, I’ll preserve their innocence a bit longer.
But history happened. It’s different from a story.
Stories let us appreciate something from a distance. They allow us to go through a range of human emotions and experiences without having the trials themselves.
You might be surprised to hear that I’ve read my children all sorts of stories filled with tragedies and pain. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve read plenty of beautiful children’s classics. I promise my kids’ lives are filled with beauty, love, and kindness most of the time.
But are they too young to grapple with hard emotions, difficult stories? I don’t think so.
Indeed, adults have been using stories to teach children harsh truths for centuries.
Ever read the original Grimm Fairy Tales? They are… well… grim.
These stories were meant to serve as harsh lessons to keep children safe. Hansel and Gretel almost get eaten by a witch in the woods so that 12th century kids wouldn’t trust strangers.
You could argue that my children won’t fully capture the nuance of stories like Animal Farm, and you’re right. But there are important lessons in these stories even if they don’t grasp the geo-political landscape from which they sprang forth. Animal Farm teaches lessons about who we should trust, the importance of education, and how memory can be manipulated.
Below, I share a conversation with my daughters—primarily my 10-year-old—about Animal Farm, illustrating that elementary-aged children can gain valuable lessons from stories typically reserved for high school students.
This was an impromptu conversation when my oldest asked me a question. She repeats that question at the beginning of the recording. My apologies for the background noise. Spoilers for Animal Farm below.
PS. If you want to learn how to have conversations like this with your kids, you might enjoy my Workshop 👉 Socratic Method for Beginners: Unlock Logical Thinking
Complex stories are one of the best ways to explore your values with your children.
How does one manage hardships? Would you speak up for someone even if it cost you your home, your job, your life?
Hopefully you don’t have to deal with these types of challenges in your real life, but stories allow us to talk about values and character. It helps our children grow into the best versions of themselves.
I believe children are far more capable than we think.
I believe they deserve to be told the truth, allowed to explore the full depths of the human soul. I won’t expose my girls to things that are overly violent or sexually explicit but …
I think The Old Man & The Sea, The Alchemist, Black Beauty, and even Jurassic Park, all of which I’ve read to my children, expand their minds, deepen their understanding of the world, and set them up for a better life.
All of this said, I wouldn’t jump right into these stories. I would build your children up through a slow diet of fairy tales (the real ones like Grimm, Beowulf, etc.), then to stories with mild danger, epics, and then finally short stories or novellas like the ones I’ve mentioned above.
I will also warn you that stories on paper are far different from the visual representation in movies.
I read Jurassic Park to my kids but they’ve yet to see the movie. Your children might have a different tolerance than my kids to visuals but mine are still easily scared.
What is imaged in the brain is the perfect match to your own personal fear level - while a movie is set for an entire society.
In the end, introducing children to complex, challenging stories is not about pushing them beyond their limits but about expanding their horizons and nurturing their moral imagination. Stories offer a safe space to wrestle with life's big questions and prepare them for a world that will, eventually, ask for their courage, resilience, and empathy.
By guiding our children through the rich landscape of literature, we don't just entertain them—we equip them to navigate life with wisdom, compassion, and strength.
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If you enjoyed this post, you might also like👉 Reading to Your Children Isn’t Enough or Curating Children's Character with Classic Literature.
Enjoy, Dr. Claire Honeycutt
This is incredible.
Can you imagine a world where this is the norm? Where multitudes of children are thinking seriously about how to decipher history books through reading Animal Farm. It seems fantastic, but you're bringing that closer to reality.
This is a great conversation!
Thanks for a very interesting, thought-provoking article. You said you’d wait until high school to introduce the Holocaust to your children, and I agree with your premise on that part of the war. There are some good books, though, including novels geared to children, to help introduce them to important themes and stories about WWII.
A novel written for children that I love, in particular, is geared toward 4th-6th graders, and was written by Hilda Van Stockum. The title is “The Winged Watchman” and it’s set in the Netherlands.
It’s about a family who runs an authentic windmill and how they not only struggle, but also thrive, during the war years in Europe. The children are playful, yes, but also highly resourceful, and they take on various active roles helping their whole family during a time of uncertainty, and sometimes, hardship. Van Stockum writes books that have empathy for children and she writes well from their perspectives, not going too deeply into the horrors of war. Instead she imparts an air of tension that children can cope with and she gives her characters important roles in which they are also faced with difficult decisions about what action to take, or not, in the context of the story. Instead, in this way, she allows children to see themselves making hard choices and also being brave, which all children long to be, when they have to make decisions in life.