Customer Reviews

Happy Birthday, Rotten Ralph

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This is one of the most awful books I have ever read! Rotten Ralph is a cat. He does a long list of awful things, like putting toothpaste into his mistress's slippers. She keeps threatening to cancel his birthday party because he's been so bad. But she never follows through and cancels it -- he just keeps doing bad things, and she just keeps on threatening the same threat but not following through. At one point Ralph thinks that she really did cancel the birthday party and he is sad about it. But then it turns out that there's a surprise birthday party for him after all. His mistress says, "You know I love you too much to cancel your birthday party." It is such an exercise in ineffective parenting that it really makes me cringe. One of the basic rules of discipline is that you should only ever threaten consequences that you are willing to follow through on, and then if the child earns the consequence, you need to follow through on what you said you'd do, preferably swiftly, and preferably not after a bunch of bad behavior and endless threats. It felt to me like Rotten Ralph's mistress had really created a climate where Ralph could continually behave badly, where he knew he didn't have to listen to what she asked, where he came to think of himself as a Rotten cat who does lots of Rotten things.

So this book is not my pick for great children's literature.