Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree

“[The Boy and Tree] are trapped in a co-dependent relationship…with the boy as the narcissistic taker and the tree as the compulsive enabler” (Strauss). Shel Silverstein’s book The Giving Tree, in the past couple of years, has gained a negative popularity among parents. Some saying it is teaching kids to be selfish and ungrateful for what their parents give them. Silverstein, who is known for his books of poems like Where the Sidewalk Ends, and A Light in the Attic, most of the poems being light hearted, is being criticized for his “darker” story about the relationship between a boy and a tree. The Giving Tree is not a story of a selfish child; it is a story of a parental figure giving everything for a child that she loves, so he would be happy.

Because she is a stump, that means that throughout the day she has given her children everything they needed. She said that as a parent “Now it's our turn to become the Giving Tree. Now is when we begin coughing up the apples - and branches - and soon, a trunk” (Prosapio). She knows that to make her children happy she will put all her energy into making sure they are. And when she exerts all her energy and feels like a stump she knows that it was worth it and necessary, and that all parents should know that as well. And she says that being tired at the end of the day is worth it because she is “happy about having my little ones run beneath my branches, sheltering them in my shade, tossing out a few apples, and, in the end, giving all that I have” (Prosapio).

In “The Giving Tree: A Modern-Day Parable of Mutual Responsibility” Ertharin Cousin talks about how her grandson read The Giving Tree and he “understood that the tree was happy, even though she was left with nothing” (Cousin). As Cousin summarizes the story she says that the story has lessons not only for children but for adults too. And says that she would call the story a “fable about the imperfect nature of human relations”