How We All Missed the Crimes, Trauma, and Weirdness in Classic Kids’ Books

When you’re a kid, you just roll with the plot.
When you’re an adult, you realize half the books we grew up with are basically crime dramas… they just hide behind bright colors and rhymes.

Exhibit A: Curious George

The story starts with a man in a giant yellow suit, who goes to Africa, sees a monkey, and decides, “Yeah, I’ll take that.” Straight up kidnapping.
Not “adopt,” not “rescue,” just international primate smuggling.
One page later, he’s got George in a burlap sack on a boat to America, and somehow this isn’t a Dateline NBC special.
Nope. It’s “a delightful children’s classic.”

Exhibit B: The Giving Tree

If you read this as a kid, it’s a sweet story about love.
If you read it as an adult, it’s about an emotionally manipulative tree in a toxic relationship with a freeloading man-child.
She gives him apples, branches, her entire trunk, and ends up a stump. The moral: “Be a doormat and maybe someone will sit on you when they’re old.”

Exhibit C: Willy Wonka

Let’s call this what it is: a death trap disguised as a candy factory.
Unpaid foreign labor, zero OSHA compliance, and a workplace injury rate of 100%.
Also, somehow, the Oompa-Loompas have pre-written songs for every kid’s death. Which means they knew it was going to happen.

Exhibit D: Babar

First page: Babar’s mom is shot by a hunter.
Second page: He moves to the city, wears clothes, comes back, and becomes king.
No therapy, no grief counseling… just “if life gets hard, become a French colonialist.”

Exhibit E: The Poky Little Puppy

This dog ignores all the rules, avoids work, and still gets dessert.
The moral? Laziness pays if you play your cards right — which, honestly, is the most relatable lesson in this list.

And Then It Hit Me…

When we misbehaved as kids, we weren’t going against what our parents wanted.

We were doing exactly what they’d trained us to do!

By letting our favorite storybook characters teach us how to lie, cheat, steal, and get away with it 🙂