#165 Superman

As I mentioned in the last post, part of our bedtime ritual is reading to the boys before bed. Although now, my oldest reads to us. He has quickly become a really good reader, so much so that it’s easy to forget he doesn’t always understand the words he is able to pronounce.




Last night he picked out a Justice League comic book as his bedtime reading. We have been working our way through the “Magic Tree House” series, but apparently are missing the next book and he refuses to read them out of order. So he picked out the comic book. He had actually started it the night before when I missed bedtime in order to go to a talk at his school. This meant I started in the middle of the story with him where the world was on fire, the seas were boiling, a character used the expletive “Hell” and the narration was that the only noble thing left to for the Justice League superheroes to do was to die. Hmm, this doesn’t really seem appropriate for a 6 year old…. Luckily, he didn’t understand much of it at all. At first I tried to explain what was happening, and then I decided he was better off not knowing. It turns out the whole scenario was a dream to warn humanity not to let it get that far, but still, it was disturbing.



It made me wonder where we got the comic book in the first place. I know I didn’t pick it up. Then I realized, we got it from Eric. Both of my boys love Superman. Two years ago my oldest had a superman birthday party and this Saturday my youngest will have one. For that birthday Eric got my son what looked like a collector’s edition Superman action figure that came with this comic book. Of course, the action figure was soon ripped out of the box, destroying any collector’s value, but we didn’t care about that. I guess I just stuck the comic book on the bookshelf and forgot about it.



Now I have to figure out what to do with it since he is actually reading. I tried telling him last night that it wasn’t really appropriate for him and he was really upset, he really wanted to finish it. Normally, I wouldn’t advocate reading without comprehension, but in this case, I think that is going to be my solution. I’ll let him finish “reading” it, but won’t help him figure out what’s happening. Then, I’ll hide it away somewhere until he’s older and can actually get something out of it and he’ll know not to go saying “hell” everywhere.



Thanks Eric.