If You Give A Mouse A Cookie Analysis

With the mass amount of entertainment and media that gets shoved in our faces on a daily basis, it can be a difficult task to look between the lines and see what’s really going on. While many of our favorite shows, movies, and books seem like light entertainment, they often carry hidden messages meant to sway us into a particular worldview. Blackmail in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, drug abuse and promiscuity in Scooby Doo, and mistrust and paranoia in If You Give A Mouse A Cookie are just a few examples of why we need to be consciously aware of what media is trying to tell us. William Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows us that he thought slavery was okay. While this wacky tale of love, treachery, and fairies might seem like light

If You Give A Mouse A Cookie by Laura Numeroff features a small mouse who asks for a glass of milk, and eventually keeps asking for more and more unnecessary things until he finally gets a cookie(Numeroff). This teaches kids one of two things depending on their temperament: either that you can be lazy and have people do things for you, or that you should mistrust everyone because they’ll take advantage of you. While this book seems like a light fun storybook about finishing off a cycle, it also tells kids that you can just leach off of other people and don’t have to do anything yourself. At first all the mouse does is ask for a glass of milk, but eventually he asks for a straw, then nails scissors, a broom, a bed, and a story to be read, and finally a cookie to finish it off(Numeroff). The mouse gets what he wants without ever having to work for it, which shows kids that you can do the same when you’re older by not striving to do anything and just live off of your parents or welfare. Along with this, it teaches some kids that if you help others, they will take advantage of you and eat you out of house and home. It shows them that you shouldn’t trust others because no one really wants your help, they want you to do their work for them. If a kid, especially a really young one, doesn’t realize that this is a work of fiction, the book’s hidden messages can stick with them as they go through adolescence and eventually into adulthood. Just as with Scooby Doo, these harmful messages can thrive because of adults being ignorant of the messages being sent. If we want to avoid spreading a message of paranoia, distrust, and laziness, we have to counteract or avoid these messages when we see them, which is why the ability to recognize them is extremely important for living in the Twenty-First