The short story written by Ray Bradbury, titled The Veldt, features a family who live in the far future. The very house they eat and sleep in is a living, serving, machine. That might sound great, but not if your children are Peter and Wendy Hadley.The house is complete with tables that make your dinner, to their own virtual reality room, but it's this room that's precisely the problem. Peter and Wendy practically live for this room. That's because it can create any scenery or situation they can imagine. But problems arise when the virtual reality room, which they call the nursery, gets stuck on one 4D image, a deadly African veldt. The parents enter the room to examine the problem and they think that the image is too real. When a pride of lions charge them they run out of the room, and the door shudders behind them as if something jumped at it. Later that night, George goes back into the nursery and realizes the room won't change into what he commands it to be, and tells Lydia that its out of order. They assume that Peter set it on the African veldt. When George asks, the kids change the scene to wonderland to prove its not broken. There George finds his old bloodied and lion-saliva covered wallet. That night they hear familiar screams and roars resounding from the nursery. Lydia and George call David, a psychologist, over to take a look at the room. He says that something about the room feels very wrong and bad. George find Lydia's scarf in the same condition as the wallet he found. The couple decide that they need to take a vacation from their techno-home, but since the children would never let the nursery go, they don't want to leave it, and throw a huge tantrum. Peter even tells his own Mother and Father, "I wish you were dead!" Their wish comes true when the kids lock their parents on the nursery to be dinner for the lions.
One of the main themes of The Veldt is that you shouldn't spoil your children. One example of this is when George was looking at the nursery, which had cost a lot of money, and stated, ''But nothing is too good for our children,''(1). Another example of this is when George decides too shut the nursery down, but Lydia takes pity on the children and replies with, ''You know how difficult they are about that. when I punished him by locking the nursery for even a few hours-The fit he threw!''(4) My last example is when The parents are evaluating their buying the nursery, Lydia sorrowfully says, "We've given the children everything they've ever wanted is this our reward-secrecy, disobedience?(10) These examples strongly suggest that you shouldn't ever spoil your children.
I would recommend this book to other seventh graders would like how Ray Bradbury predicted the future in a way by making up technology that is present nowadays. I would also like to give this book to other seventh graders because it leaves a chilling impression. It also gives an exaggerated example to not spoil your kids. This was a great book for me and will be for other 7th graders.
