Nursery rhyme contest aims to oust violence

At first, when I saw the headline, I thought "Yeah; nursery rhymes are pretty gruesome, surely it can't be healthy" But then I got to thinking and suspect that some of the mitigating factors alluded to in the article are worth bearing in mind to. I don't ever recall thinking about the meaning of nursery rhymes until I was quite a bit past using them as a child. So I am not certain at all that their violent nature is actually something that really imprints on a child. It's like the act of singing or reciting them is handled by a different part of the brain than real meaning-carrying speech [maybe supported by the experience of some stroke victims who can't talk but can sing songs]. Then there is the whol issue about how scary and violent children's stories often are -the Grimm brothers certainly deserve their name as it sounds in English. So what is the existence of such scary material in the nursery saying to us about our collective psyche? I suspect that kids have no real idea, often, what is so scary about what is depicted in nursery rhymes or even the fairy stories. It is as we grow up and widen our experience to discover [I'm generalising and I know there are some tragic exceptions] that sometimes things can be as nasty as they are protrayed. Is it that the adults who sing and recitre these for the children originally were having a bit of a laugh at the child's naivety? All these horrible things and see how they don't affect such innocents [because they are innocent of the real import of the words]?

I have to say that with our own kids we didn't use traditional nursery rhymes very much and this was not because we didn't like the content, it was just that we wanted to do other things with them and traditional nursery rhymes didn't really figure much in what we felt we wanted to do. I think our kids learnt what they learnt of them at nursery and school.
Anyway I'll leave the last word to someone who is skeptical of the drive to unviolence nursery rhymes, though I must say the idea of doing what they suggest does seem grim; composing is rather different to inheriting nursery nasties, don't you think?
"'Let's have pneumatic drills going through our feet, trees falling on us, and people going to bed and bumping their head. This is the language of folk and fairy story - kids like this. They help us explore our fears and delights.'"
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