Re:Peter Pan, Existentialist Fairy Tale? (2017)
by smorgusofborg on Thursday September 09, 2021 @03:47PM
(#28473851)
The fertility rate in the UK cut in half from 1880 to 1920. During this time the general approach to children rearing began to correspond to a much higher level of parental investment in individual children.
Re:Peter Pan, Existentialist Fairy Tale? (2017)
by thaumasiotes on Thursday September 09, 2021 @04:13PM
(#28474119)
So what? How is that connected to what you tell your surviving children when one of their siblings dies?
Re:Peter Pan, Existentialist Fairy Tale? (2017)
by fennecfoxen on Thursday September 09, 2021 @02:58PM
(#28473287)
this is because it is not a cause and effect thing like you’re trying to read it as here; the author simply wrote the book when those were contemporary circumstances, even if they had been worse before
meanwhile the book’s words about what happened to those children are a fiction hinting at the truth of the loss of a child and are more symbolic than literal documentary words
> Hence the need for a childrens tale to explain to the little ones why their infant brothers or sisters weren't coming home from the hospital
This makes no sense; if the problem was worse before, why would you suddenly need a new story for it? If the need was real, the relevant stories would have originated long before the 20th century.
The approaches that worked for the past 100,000 years also worked in 1904 and still work now.
(Also, the book is explicit that the children of Neverland found their way there by falling out of their perambulators (strollers); they did not fail to come home from a hospital.)