While there are some strange nursery rhymes I learned as a child, if I had any analytical muscles in that little brain of mine, I was definitely taking in a lot of good lessons while learning to rhyme. Hush Little Baby, for instance, is very sweet, but also a very important lesson on the effective art of bribery that worked for me on my little sisters on numerous occasions. Humpty-Dumpty taught me that sometimes your breakfast goes to pot and there’s just nothing you can do about it. And while no one’s fond of spiders, that never held the Itsy-Bitsy Spider back when the rain came. He kept on going. You name one song you remember as a child and see if there aren’t any practical implications in that.
Both my grandmother and PBS have done an amazing job at teaching truth when I wasn’t looking through song and rhyme. It was a good way to learn and be creative at the same time (2 year olds don’t question why girls are named Miss Muffet, or why you could never see the whole upper body of Nanny from the Muppet Baby’s – but I knew that when my room looked kinda weird and I wished I wasn’t there…I could close my eyes and make believe and I could be anywhere). You know you missed out in childhood when you don’t have a song for the all-important social norms like cleaning up, sharing, and liking people for who they are on the inside. Those little rhymes when I hear them now make me feel like I was being educated and comforted at the same time. Here’s one in particular that I came across at PBS.org: It’s You I Like. I hope it makes you smile.
