Nursery rhymes are creepy and disturbing

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The Kid would rather read magazines anyway.
I've been ruminating on this for a while, especially after learning about the alleged plague interpretation of the history behind Ring Around the Rosie. I stopped singing Rock-a-bye Baby to The Kid because when the bough breaks, the cradle will fall and who really wants to teach their kids that they're going to fall out of a tree while they are sleeping?

Some have proposed the inspiration of Three Blind Mice was Queen Mary I of England, otherwise known as Bloody Mary. While scholars at Rutgers note that it is possible this nursery rhyme was rooted in the politics of the time, there is no definitive proof of her having three political adversaries dismembered in any fashion.

Regardless, who really wants to teach their kids to sing about dismembering rodents? Isn't there something more positive we can sing to our kids?

When you start singing Humpty Dumpty, don't you picture an egg? That is a thoroughly modern interpretation of this particular ditty, with historians debating if it was in reference to King Richard III of England or a siege engine used during the English Civil War. Again, the theories of the origins of Humpty Dumpty are fascinating, especially when you consider that according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was a term used to reference a drink of brandy heated with ale in the seventeenth century.

Who cares if Little Miss Muffet written my an entomologist regarding his step-daughter, or if it was referring to Mary, Queen of Scots and her fear of religious reformer John Knox? It's a great way to introduce fear of spiders to kids.

I could go on and on, but I think I'll stick to happier fare when it's time to sing to The Kid for bed.  

Author's note: Before you suggest Wikipedia isn't a valid source for research, I did a lot of background on this and found their versions of the history of each song to be accurate. There is also a fair amount of academic research that suggests crowd-sourcing knowledge in forums like Wikipedia is more accurate than typical encyclopedias. 

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