“Let me write a nation’s songs, and I care not who writes its laws.”

Much has been written of the impact on children of mass media, with their excesses of violence and sex and their distortion of reality. The trouble may start at the parents’ knee with indoctrination through nursery rhymes.

Make a list of rhymes and stories that you remember and discuss their unpleasant overtones.

For example, did you ever think of the “four and twenty blackbirds” being baked alive?