What childhood favourite did not go to plan when you shared it with DC?

[ImImmortalNowBabyDoll]

DD6 is quite strong in her understanding of books and stories and I've been reading my own childhood favourites to her for a few years now- Narnia, Five Children and It, The Borrowers etc. She's not particularly sensitive and not prone to get upset by stories usually.

About a week ago I pulled A Little Princess off the shelf and thought that the language is quite complex but I think she'll like the story.

Anyway, we got to the chapter where Sara's Dad dies and she's removed from her own birthday party, stripped of all her possessions and sent to live in the attic as a servant and she was absolutely devastated. First off furious, ranting about Miss Minchin, and then in floods of tears. She said she hates the book so I asked if she wanted to stop and pick something else but now she needs to know what happens next, so she's furious with me too. 😳

Oops.

My youngest son is 9 and he loves watching YouTube videos with me of some of the scenes from TSOM where they are all singing 🤣

And he adores the puppet show scene!!

I know he’d never sit and watch the film with me but I’m thankful he’ll at least do the above 🤣

I imagine all interest will soon come to an end though!

Kid’s these days don’t have a clue what they’re missing out on 🤣

I loved the Gremlins film!

I know though that my boys would be absolutely terrified if I tried to make them watch it (they are 9 and 12 and very sensitive souls).

TBF - the scene where one of them turns into a spider gremlin and the red haired lady gets trapped in the web is pretty horrifying 🤣

I loved this film growing up but when I watch it now I feel very uncomfortable about how scared Baby Toby is in those scenes with all the goblins. It’s awful 😬

I will always be in awe of his amazing stripy “Where’s Wally” baby-gro though 🤣

My DCs haven't liked a lot of my childhood favourite foods which I was surprised about. There's a few of my childhood dishes I make (very well if I do say so myself!) which they tolerate at best.

Also, books. All the books I thought were amazing and fantastic are meh to them.

Read Marianne Dreams to DS when he was 8 (which is a similar age that I read it). Terrified him and he wouldn’t let me finish it. We didn’t even get as far as the stones, just the whole premise of being trapped inside your own drawing freaked him out. I would love to read him Charlotte Sometimes too, but I know he won’t enjoy that either.

He is a lot ”younger” than I was though. He also didn’t like the original Little Mermaid where the Prince never actually loved her and she turns into sea foam, which was my absolute favourite aged 5-6. He likes stories like Big Sky Mountain and Pippi Longstocking, and still loves picture books so very different level of maturity.

Maybe he will also skip my morbid Dostoyevsky-reading teen years too!

This may be true, and we certainly watch a lot of films- some that never had a book and some that we've read. I think it's very rare for a film adaptation of a book to be as good as the book, and even rarer for a book adaptation of a film to be as good as the film. There are exceptions. We just read and then went to see The Magic Faraway Tree, the film was lovely, the book (which DD loved and I loved as a child) maybe wasn't as great as I recalled.

However, I want DD to be able to experience the book as it was written and be able to add her own imagination to the story. She can see the film afterwards and contrast that with her own picture.

In the case of A Little Princess, it's a completely different story. They set it in America, changed the time period, completely changed the ending and even significantly altered Sara's character. Watching the film first would make the book completely confusing for a 6 yo.

I read Charlotte's Web to mine and she burst into tears at the end. Still hasn't really forgiven me. She also couldnt get past the fact that adults were playing the part of high school kids in Grease!

I'm with you on the food, DD is terrible and apparently hates all flavours. Pasta with butter is her favourite. I blame DH, who comes from a family of fussy eaters, although he himself is slightly more adventurous.

She loved Pippi! We read Finn Family Moomintroll around the same time when we were preparing to go to Lapland, I thought it was fun to explore a bit of Nordic culture. I don't know the two you mention, I'll have to look them up. Coraline is on our list but I might keep it for Halloween.

Marianne Dreams is terrifying! Great book, though.

I did try Charlotte's Web and she got bored but it was before she turned 5 so probably just too young. It was a lot less childish than I remembered and almost brutally honest about farm life.

DS hated Home Alone when we tried to watch it when he was 7. He didn’t like the other kids bullying Kevin and the adults turning a blind eye to it. We didn’t make it past 10 minutes.

He‘s also not in to Roald Dahl because of the meanness. Apart from The Witches, we‘ve had to abandon the lot.

Adored Narnia - particularly the old language, but won’t entertain The Hobbit.

I read a lot of old stuff as a child, and a lot is now simply too old for his generation. Arthur Ransome, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Enid Blyton. He enjoyed the televised Just William, though, so I might try him on my full collection of Richmal Crompton.

DS1 wasn’t keen on any of the old favourites (but now has read lots of them off his bat as instructed by his English teacher ‘for context’). DS2 thankfully has been happy to be read lots. I am rather regretting Redwall as I had the first five, he has bought the next three and I can see they’ll be bedtime reading until GCSEs at the current rate of going (he’s 10).

Guys and Dolls utterly bombed here, to my surprise and slight miffedness.

The girls dad dying in the chimney is pretty traumatic too. I remember this as a family friendly film but it’s really not

Sadly neither of my (now young adult) children liked any of the books I loved as a young child - Wizard of Oz, The Faraway Tree, Narnia series etc.

I bought my bookish, tomboy DD ‘Anne of Green Gables’ when she was about 11 and and was sure she would love it, but she threw it down in frustration about 20 pages in and said it was so wordy and long winded and slow, and Anne was ‘super annoying’ <blasphemy!>

Both have been largely bored stiff by my classic 80s & 90s film suggestions, too. I was sure they’d love Neverending Story, Dark Crystal, ET, Gremlins, Goonirs…but no…just constantly sidetracked by how bad the special effects were ‘in the olden days’, mostly.

Back to the Future was a hit, though.

The modern editions of Malory towers /st Claire's don't look half as good as the originals though .....a bit dumbed down maybe
I read and reread them for years. Couldn't find them when my girls were if an appropriate age sadly

Sylvanian families, never had them as a child but was so envious of my friends who did. So excited to get them for my kids, the one who I thought would love it was totally uninterested. Ended up selling them on Vinted !

Back to the future was it a hit with DS10, as was flight of the navigator and ET
Elf and Home Alone….not so much

Ooooo where did you find that! I used to love it!

I have my grandma's collectible Brambly Hedge plates from 1982 on display in my kitchen they are nostalgic enough for me.

My 4yo enjoyed The Enormous Crocodile so I thought I would try some other Roald Dahl, I was a bit alarmed by how scary a lot of the grown ups are in those books. He didn't mind a bit though, which surprised me, because when we'd previously tried to read Mr. Gum (Andy Stanton) he said that was too scary.

I had fond memories of Mrs. Pepperpot so I bought an anthology of those stories, but a lot of the language is so dated he really struggled to follow the story at all, even when I substituted some words a lot of the situations were just completely alien to him, like the little girl who comes visiting because she doesn't have any toys or Christmas decorations.

And I got him a set of Mr. Men books because he enjoyed a couple we had and some of them are quite horrifyingly judgemental! Mr. Greedy is a particularly alarming one. However, DS does not see it this way. He asks me to read Mr. Greedy because he loves his belly and aspires to be just like him

I met Roger Hargreaves as a small dc... He was better than God imo!

I had rose tinted memories of collecting tadpoles as a kid, and watching them grow in a fishbowl before releasing the little frogs...

So I took my kids to a little stream to try and scoop some out. I'd been building up the magic of it. Yeah,no... Two of us got dog shit all over us, someone else half-slipped into the water and got upset, no tadpoles were caught and we went home miserable as hell 😂

Also beanie babies, so many of them, found in the loft. I thought they'd love this treasure trove, but every single one ended up in the charity shop. I cherished those when I was a kid 🥹😂

My mum went on and on about this when it was on at the RSC. The play was very well done. But I could t make head nor tai of the storyline!

DD actually liked some older books. She loved Narnia, The Hobbit (but balked at LOTR), all of Roald Dahl, Malory Towers, all of Noel Streatfeild etc. She could not get on with What Katy Did, The Little White Horse or Little Women.

For those who worried about baby Toby in Labyrinth, I looked him up and it doesn't seem to have harmed him - he's doing very well for himself. I know what you mean though, I hate to see babies crying or frightened in things.