I FUCKING LOVE THE SUMMARY
Summary: Russian children’s books focus more heavily on negative human emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear than books US parents are likely to expose their young children to.
Because three paragraphs down it says the following about American books vs Russian books
Yankee:
“In the U.S., there’s an emphasis on the value of positive emotions—such as happiness or pride,” says Amy Halberstadt, co-author of a paper describing both studies and a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University.
Russian:
“In Russia, there’s more nuance,” says Yulia Chentsova-Dutton, corresponding author of the paper and an associate professor of psychology at Georgetown University. “Russian culture seems to value all emotions—including negative emotions—and it is important to learn from these emotions.
Long story short, showing children the broad range of human emotions helps them understand and deal with their emotions in a more positive manner than only showing a narrower range.
"We raise our children to be emotionally better than Russians" -parent in only country where teenage mass shooters regularly appear
to be fair our citizens have more mass than any other countries so that's simply inevitable
This is something that really bugs me about all the Anglo crap my kids watch on the TV. It is all so sugary positive that it makes you want to vomit. Everyone are friends, nobody is ever in any real danger, nobody ever gets angry or raises their voice. Everything always works out just fine in the end.
There are no hard edges in these shows, neither figuratively or literally. It is all an endless repetition of the same script, acting like a vessel for branding and marketing of toys and other merchandise.
By doing so it teaches kids to hide their negative emotions and to gloss over conflicts. It indoctrinates then into docile liberalism.
Even Danish children's TV is better. It is far from the gore and horror of Grimm's fairy tales (which I loved as a kid btw) it still deals with real conflicts seen from children's perspective. They can tell a story about a kid being sad that her parents are divorced, or about being angry at the grown-ups for being boring. The most beloved character for generations is a five year old bear who constantly has to be told not to act like a selfish asshole to his friends.
Idk how old your kids are but yeah there's a lot of that. There's a couple of American shows that explore negative emotions in a nuanced way and have high stakes and danger like you mentioned — especially she ra and steven universe — but in the whole Anglo shows are mostly trash
The only gods are Azatoth, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Paw Patrol, they are uncaring and merciless.
All of Anglo society is like this, especially the USA. You have to always be in cheery salesman/three ring circus leader mode. We have a lot of Orientalist myths about how other countries can't show emotions or are "cold" (Russia notably being a place where people are considered "emotionally distant") whereas in reality if you show anything other than enthusiasm in the US, you are a monster or a "fiery" Latin type or something.
Russia notably being a place where people are considered “emotionally distant”)
If you say a country where fraternal handholding and kissing is the cultural norm is emotionally distant, I'm calling you a straight psycho
They're natural authoritarians old bean! And they threaten our empire in Central Asia and demand access to our seas.
In the US we have a huge amount of kids toys, books, clothes etc that center around Noah's Ark. Lots of happy smiling animals and rainbows. Usually a cute old man with a bushy beard, too. And absolutely zero references to the millions of people (including all the little kids) God drowned in the story, which was the reason for the Ark in the first place.
Bear girl has past as noted tractorist at her collective farm but in Great Patriotic War she drives tank top crush fascist invaders.
To the people imagining a bear girl driving her tank top and using it to crush fascists.... :spray-bottle:
We now return to popular Russian children's programming: Shoe and Shoelace.
"Shoe and Shoelace, one is meaningless without the other."
credits roll as the USSR anthem plays.
German fairy tales are about 95% "don't be bad or a goblin will eat you".
To be fair to the Germans, I've been good my whole life, and so far? Zero Goblins
