What I think about Peter Pan
...e don't grow when they remove your swathing sheet.'" Here is the introduction of this story and its author: Before it was a play, Peter Pan was a small story in a 1902 book by Barrie called The Little White Bird. The character of Peter from this novel was developed into the play Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, in 1904. Peter Pan was a fantasy, but not any mere fairy tale. Like Peter Pan himself, Barrie was a boy who refused to grow up. Barrie took such elements of life as his awkwardness with, yet dependence upon women, his love of children, and his own longing for childhood and shaped them into one of the best-loved stories of all time. There is, in many of our stories for children, a spoken or unspoken moral lesson that is often brought to fruition by violence. Again, in Peter Pan, I have found that there is a lot of implied and explicit violence in Neverland, mostly coming from the pirates. We know all to well that kids are having to deal with this on a day-to-day basis. Ultimately, in my opinion, it seems it's better to talk about it than to pretend it doesn't exist. The story of Peter Pan is simple, but it is not just a story to me. After my reading, I’ve asked myself several questions, to quite a lot of which I even can’t give my own answer. I think they are the problems we all need to think, children or adults, both. Let me share them with you: -What do you think about living forever as a kid and never growing up? Would you be interested in doing that? What are the good parts of that? What would you miss if you never grew up? -Peter Pan is also about the idea of "play vs. work". Do you still make believe, pretending you are Peter or Wendy or Hook? -At what age do you think we start to tell children to stop pretending? Do you get embarrassed when someone catches you playing make-believe? Do you think we should always be able to pretend? Do you think we let boys or girls play pretend longer? When do we start ...