Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree is a pretty well-known children’s book. Working in childcare for as long as I have, I have to say it was probably the second most common children’s book I came across in classrooms and homes, after Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. I don’t know how old I was when I first read the book, but I remember the first time I realized how much I disliked it: I was 20 years old, working as a lead teacher of an after-school program, and I had checked out The Giving Tree on a field trip to the local library. As I was sitting on the floor of the classroom, reading the book aloud, I suddenly realized that I recognized the tree’s behavior. It was my own, in every single romantic relationship I’d had since I started dating at 15.

Since that day, I’ve gone back to school, taken literature, child psychology, and women’s studies classes, and earned my Bachelors – and throughout all I’ve seen and learned, I haven’t changed my mind about The Giving Tree in the slightest. The book portrays two characters, a boy and a female tree. Unsurprisingly, given the title, the tree is known for her generosity to the boy. The boy is shown as having a relationship to the tree only in the beginning, when she is the center of his childhood play. During the rest of the book, he drifts farther and farther away, only returning when he needs something; yet the tree gives up her apples, her branches, and finally her trunk, leaving her with no more than a stump sticking out of the ground. This seems like a beautiful story of selfless love…or is it?

The genders of the characters in the story are no mistake. In our society, the taker is a masculine role, and the giver is a feminine role. Women have traditionally been expected to put men and their needs first, whereas men have been encouraged to be ambitious and successful without regard to others, and this book is merely an embodiment of these roles. Consider the message that this book will send to your children: to girls, it holds in high esteem the woman who sacrifices everything for others, despite the fact that she thereby denies herself the opportunity for healthy, fulfilling relationships; to boys, it encourages them to take from others whenever it will satisfy their own needs, and that the purpose of those who love them is to endure this taking and still be there for them the next time. Do you want your little girls allowing themselves to be abused by men out of some desperate ideal of love? Do you want your little boys being the abusers because they’ve been taught that others are simply there to serve them?

Of course, I don’t believe in banning books, and I don’t believe in sheltering children; I believe in introducing them to distasteful things, in order to give them the opportunity to form an opinion under your guidance (and not their peers’). No matter how hard a sheltering parent tries, children are all eventually faced with the evil of the world, and they’ll need to know how to deal with it when they are. So, yes, I believe you should read this book to your child. Read this book and then ask your child to consider the values it puts forth. Talk to your child about why it’s wrong to give without regard to one’s own well being, and why it’s wrong to take without regard to others’. Show your child that not all books have something good to say, but that we can learn from them what not to be.