Too young for Easter?

My 4 year old daughter is in Foundation Stage at a voluntary controlled C of E school, so perhaps I should not have been surprised when she came home yesterday with a little concertina book she had made at school, entitled “The Easter Story”. It contained a series of pictures cut out and stuck in to the book, for her to colour in, including one of Jesus on the cross. She pointed at this and said, “That’s when they banged the nails into his feet”. Then she said, “A cross looks a bit like a letter T, doesn’t it?”

I felt slightly winded by her first comment – my little Poppet, aged four, is being taught about one of the most celebrated examples of man’s fear, suspicion and brutality. She does not yet have any concept of who or what God is, nor what faith is, nor who Jesus might have been, so how is she to comprehend this story in its wider context? Her school has followed its policies on teaching key points in the Christian calendar, and introduced even the youngest in the school to the Easter story, but without a wider understanding of what it means. When I’ve asked Poppet, she doesn’t seem to have been taught about notions of sin, redemption, forgiveness, what the Bible is... So to her it’s a pretty gruesome story, accompanied by pictures to colour in – let’s get out the pencils and have some fun colouring in this image of a man dying a horrible death.

Perhaps it’s a timely reminder of what actually happened at the crucifixion – it’s a shocking story when told bluntly, and my own agnostic tendencies make it difficult for me to feel completely mollified by the idea of the resurrection. My daughter’s own understanding of death (my Grandmother died when Poppet was 2, my 20 year-old sister died when she was 3) is very much that people die and are gone. She is matter-of-fact about this; we remember time we spent with them, we have pictures of them, we might use some of their belongings and remember them using them in their turn, but they’re gone. She didn’t know until yesterday that sometimes people die because other people kill them.

Am I wrong to be shocked by this little book? By this lesson in a religious story, taught by a faith school? It seems to me that childhood innocence is terribly precious – we have plenty of time as adults to be bombarded with the understanding of the myriad ways people have of being cruel, brutal and inhumane. I have tried to shield her thus far from the fact that people not only die, they also kill; that our bodies can both withstand and inflict unimaginable pain and suffering. She’s only four – she likes Angelina Ballerina, Alfie and Annie Rose, Peppa Pig, chocolate spread on toast and playing on her slide in the garden. She sleeps with 5 different cuddly toys in her bed and is overjoyed to be starting swimming lessons this week. She’s a privileged little girl, and we are lucky enough to live in a country that is not at war, where children do not routinely die of poverty, neglect or disease, where violence is not something she sees in the street. Am I wrong to feel that I would like to protect her from the brutality of the world until she is older? I do not see that there is anything to be gained by exposing her to such things at such an age – it will give her nightmares, or perhaps worse, begin that process whereby people become so immune to such acts of violence that they willingly watch them for entertainment.

She is a child, and I would like her to remain so for a little while longer. I do not want her dreaming about people banging nails into other people’s feet.