✧ 5 little monkeys [essay]

(read below like a research paper, formally and seriously)

“5 Little Monkeys” is a classic nursery rhyme, one that many will recognize easily. Though the most common interpretation is that it teaches children about counting and consequences, this paper presents a different view on the meaning of the story — one that centers around child neglect and mental instability.

For purpose of convenience, this essay will refer to the nursery rhyme, though its contents will apply to other forms of media in any of the various forms it has taken, ranging from poem to song to storybook.

The narrative begins with “five little monkeys jumping on the bed,” though it does not specify whether they are supervised or not. This possibly purposeful censorship could mean that the children were participating in a potentially (and later, proven) dangerous activity without active supervision. This could add to charges of neglect for the mother.

Little clues within the story allow the listener to infer that these events all progressed throughout the same day. As the lyrics say, as each monkey gets injured and thus has to inhibit themself from further participating in bed-jumping. However, young children are particularly well-known for their persistence, and as exhibited throughout the song, the mother does not seem to be able to or care at all to control her children. Concurring with the author’s personal experience with children, it is likely that if this events occured over several days, the injured children would determine that they felt well enough to continue jumping, disregarding their previous experience with the activity¹. This could mean that after the first monkey was injured and the mother called the doctor, whose instructions were to prohibit any more jumping on the bed, the mother was aware of the monkeys’ jumping and decided not to follow the doctor’s advice, whether through telling the children but receiving no agreement or not telling the children at all about the instructions to stop jumping. This may have been due to neglect and the lack of will to control her children, some sort of mental instability or disorder, or distrust for the doctor.

Why call the doctor in the first place, then?

It is likely that even when neglectful for one’s children, one would not want to have to handle any dead. The mother’s thought process could have been this: “I should call the doctor just to make sure these children won’t die. If they do, I could be charged with neglect or have to spend a lot of time and effort on taking care of their death and not being found out.” Who would want to bury a body when they could put a little effort in to avoid having a dead body in the first place? Once the mother received no grievous news from the doctor, she had no more care for what the children did. Some have presented differing arguments for this, though (see Yiptong, Ruby).

Others also had their own points of view on the content of the nursery rhyme. One example is of Andrew Liang’s input over iMessage when requested to comment: “They all got concussions and had permanent Brian damage which caused them not to function without help of others around them/ the mother” (Liang, 2024). This response is direct — the writer’s belief is that the young monkeys received concussions that inflicted permanent damage to their brains, which could have been the cause of hyperdependency in the children. This could also mean that Liang considers the “children” to perhaps be older than the nursery rhyme implies, their hyperdependency being linked to a decrease in maturity and an increase in “childlike” behavior.

Another, Ruby Yiptong, responded to the prompt with the following: “The monkeys probably already went through this multiple times and gained a significant amount of brain damage, hence the reason why they keep not listening to the mom and she’s stipuck with 6 children so she became an alcoholic because they’re all stupid and the doctor blocked them so she pretends she’s calling the doctor but her children monkeys are all just delusional due to their massive brain injuries” (Yiptong, 2024).

The writer here agrees with Liang’s theory of the brain damage dealt to these monkeys, explaining that she believes that this caused the irresponsible behavior (jumping on the bed after being instructed not to by the doctor). The writer introduces the idea of the mother’s dependency on alcohol, allegedly due to the reason that “[the monkeys are] all stupid” (Yiptong, 2024), as shown above. She follows that with an explanation for the repeated calls to the doctor, elaborating that the mother is pretending to call the doctor, though in reality she receives no response.

This is supported by the cost of the phone bill, price of emergency healthcare (in America, where this story originated), and the repeated calls for the same type of injury. This must cost a lot of money, and the repeated calls are simply illogical. There is a chance that the calls are to console the children, though, which would quell their worries. Adding to this, Yiptong also presents the possibility of an entirely delusional family, the mother affected by alcohol and the children due to their “massive brain injuries” (Yiptong, 2024). This would mean that the entire family could have been imagining these events.

(read dramatically, like you’re in a shampoo commercial and being forced to read philosophical poetry)

If the whole family, or even just the mother, were making this up in their/her mind, the story of this nursery rhyme must not be real — but it is real to the monkey(s) in their heads.

(read like an overly enthusiastic advertisement for toys)

This is why I’m here with an offer for diagnosis and therapy! Your diagnosis will be 30% off and your first session free!

(go back to reading dramatically)

For us, though, it is just a nursery rhyme meant to teach children about counting and consequences.

Footnotes:

1. Though, the children may just be intelligent/self-aware enough to learn from previous experiences, particuarly with pain and injuries. This analysis is based off of my personal encounters and time spent with young children. ↩︎

Sources cited:

Liang, Andrew. Text messages sent over iMessage, 2024. Accessed 1 Jun 2024.

Yiptong, Ruby. Direct messages sent over Discord, 2024. http://www.discord.com (exact link censored for account privacy). Accessed 7 Jun 2024.