I’m not how sure this initially came up in my household, but today I was discussing The Three Little Pigs with my nine year-old son and he told me that it was his impression that the first two pigs had become wolf meat and that only the last pig with the brick house had survived. He insisted that the story was taught to him that way in nursery school, and I expressed surprise firstly because that’s a brutal lesson to teach pre-schoolers and secondly because that’s not how I remember the story.

In my memory, the first pig in the straw house scurries to safety in the second pig’s house of sticks. Then both of them seek refuge in the brick house and they all survive because the wolf can’t blow a brick house down.  So, this became a matter of contention between my son and me, and we brought in CabinGirl to see if she could settle the matter. I didn’t explain anything to her in advance. I simply asked her what happened to the pigs at the end of the story. And she gave a version the same as mine. All three pigs survived and lived happily ever after.

Naturally, since we’re all so fortunate to have the Google, I looked it up.  The truth is even more horrible than my son’s version.

The story begins with the title characters being sent out into the world by their mother, to “seek out their fortune”. The first little pig builds a house of straw, but a wolf blows it down and devours him. The second little pig builds a house of sticks, which the wolf also blows down, and the second little pig is also devoured…

…The third little pig builds a house of bricks. The wolf fails to blow down the house. He then attempts to trick the pig out of the house by asking to meet him at various places, but he is outwitted each time. Finally, the wolf resolves to come down the chimney, whereupon the pig catches the wolf in a cauldron of boiling water, slams the lid on, then cooks and eats him.

But before you conclude that CabinGirl and I are idiots, there’s more to it:

In some versions, the first and second little pigs are not eaten by the wolf after he demolishes their homes, but instead run to their brother’s house, and after the wolf goes down the chimney he either dies like in the original, or runs away and never returns to eat the three little pigs, who all survive in either case.

It seems that Generation X got the G-rated version of The Three Little Pigs and my son got the original in all its violent glory.

My general impression is that this example is an outlier. In most ways, kids today are protected more than they were in my childhood. We left the house without telling our parents where we were going. We rode bikes on busy highways with no helmets. We had sleepovers and went on road trips without keeping in telephonic communication.  My friend and I would even go into New York City both with and without permission and just walk around.  We did this as middle schoolers. I don’t see kids today getting that kind of trust and freedom.  Even college students sometimes complain about information that might trigger trauma and ask for safe spaces. It’s true that conservatives are obsessed with this practice, but I find it odd too.  But, then, I never once thought that I might be shot while in a classroom.

I’m not sure why they cleaned up the The Three Little Pigs story for my generation. When I saw the original version where the third pig traps and eats the wolf, I did remember having heard it before. Either way, there’s a different lesson involved depending on which version you tell.

In one version, the stupid perish, and deservedly so. The clever prevail and have plenty to eat. In the other version, the clever look out for the less clever and help them to overcome their limitations. There was never any suggestion in the story I was told that the Brick House-pig was giving his brothers a handout they didn’t deserve.  But I think my son thought my version was cutting the weak and stupid too much slack.  He had internalized the moral of the story and it stuck with him. The moral wasn’t necessarily pleasant, but it was clear. If you want to survive, have a good plan that will work.  The moral that stuck with me was that brothers lend brothers a hand.

It’s interesting to see how a small difference in how a story is told in nursery school can shape your outlook for a lifetime.