You can’t judge a book by its cover, and Kayla Sykes is warning parents about a seemingly harmless children’s book that may actually promote violence. The mom took to Facebook to share her horror after coming across a nonchalantly violent riddle in the book No More Poems: A Book in Verse That Just Gets Worse. Her warning quickly made the rounds, where it’s been shared more than 13,000 times in just a matter of days.
“If you happen to shop at Costco, please do not buy the children’s book No More Poems,” the mom warns. “It includes a horrifying poem with specific details on how to kill your younger sibling. It’s absolutely disgusting.”
The poem is titled “Brotherly Love” and told in the voice of a parent. While the parent in the poem is urging her little girl to be kind to her brother, it provides pretty detailed ways the sister could hurt her sibling and potentially kill him. It’s accompanied by an illustration of a girl who has tied up her brother, blindfolded him and left him on the tracks of a toy railroad set.
“If you take a pillow/ And you smother brother’s head/ I’ve got a strong suspicion/ That he might wake up dead,” the riddle reads. Some other snippets include the mom telling her daughter not to push her brother out the window or drown him in the tub.
“I’m not sure how the publisher allowed this to slip by, but perhaps they can shed some light because the author Rhett Miller has blocked me on Facebook,” Syke says. “Talk about putting ideas in a child’s head. I’m so disgusted this was even published”
Children have active imaginations that come to life through storytime. Although the poem was probably meant to be light and funny, you never know how a youngster may interpret it. Parents had a lot to say, and many were in agreeance.
“It’s inappropriate particularly because it gives specific examples on ways to do it, even though they are cleverly presented as humor,” one comment says.
“For those of you who think this is no big deal—and I can’t say that I know because I have not read the poem—and compare today to 30 or 40 years ago when we were growing up, that is not the case,” a user points out. “We have a culture of death in society these days, suicide is at dangerous levels, especially among youth…We are living in a culture of death and things like this should not be taken too lightly.”
Others, however, thought the mom was being irrational.
“Totally overreacting. It’s a poem, not a step-by-step to being a serial killer. Leave it be,” one person advises.
“I just read this out loud to my kids. They just laughed and said ‘what?’ They know better. I won’t be buying the book, but we all got a laugh from it,” a mom admits.
After the message blew up on the social network, Sykes shared a follow-up post in response to the criticism she’s received.
“The book is aimed for 4- to 8-year-olds, and while reading with my 2- and 8-year-old tonight… I don’t know how to explain the emotions that went through me. Perhaps the author was instructing certain children not to do these things, but he’s also influencing children and teaching children the capabilities of these horrific scenarios,” she says. “There is a potential for relatable humor, maybe. But I also have had students that can be easily influenced and manipulated, and just the simple idea of these dark events could make them act out impulsively.”
