Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney

Greg Heffley gets a journal from his mom and he chronicles his year in middle school. The book is filled with vignettes from throughout the year. He has a little brother who gets away with everything, he has an older brother who lives to torment him. His best friend, Rowley, is embarrassing a lot of the time because he still acts like a little kid. There is a piece of cheese on the basketball court that is old and moldy. If you touch it, you have the “cheese touch” which is basically cooties. The only way to get rid of it is to touch someone else. If you get the cheese touch though, kids avoid you like the plague.

Greg and Rowley egg some high school kids on while they are trick-or-treating. The high schoolers follow them in their truck, but Greg and Rowley end up getting home safely. At the end of the year, the high schoolers find them and make Rowley eat the cheese. The next day at school, kids start asking about what happened to the cheese and Greg says he was sick of it being on the court, so he threw it away. Kids now avoid him, but Greg doesn’t mind. He’s friends with Rowley.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid may be meant for slightly older children but because of the reading level and appeal, it’s usually read by slightly younger children than perhaps intended- 3rd-5th grade. This makes the profuseness of inappoporiate words and actions all the more unsettling. These words and actions may seem mild to most of the world, but I don’t want my children to act or think like most of the world.

It may resonate with middle schoolers because it is how they think, but it is certainly not a good example of what kind of middle schooler I want my children to become. I also had a friend tell me she feels like this book “ruined reading” for her son. It sets a precedent that books should be all about laughs and gross humor without anything stimulating or even very encouraging. Yes, I want my children to read for pleasure, but I don’t want what they read to validate sinful behavior or encourage undesirable actions. This is why I have chosen to give this book a Mom Stop.

Sexual Content:
Calls certain girls “hot girls”
Talks about how he has “always been into girls”
Says girls are interested in you if you have a “cute butt”
He feels a “breeze down below” while wearing a singlet in gym class
His brother has a magazine with a girl in a bikini on it

Language: Uses sissy, moron, dumbest (toward a person), dork, calls bigs kids “gorillas”, stinky poos, pee, fart, weird (towards a person), band called “Loaded Diaper”, nerds, freak show, idiots, thank “God”

Questionable behaviors:
Picture of Greg being punched by a bully
Lies so a kid who isn’t cool won’t sit by him
Judges someone because they have braces
Questions his dad’s common sense
Deceives his dad to make him think he worked out
Steals his brother’s CD with parental warning
Deceives a friend’s parent by putting video game in another case
Slanders other kid running for student office
Looking to “pay a girl back” for tipping teacher off that answers for a test were visible
Purposefully ruins the school play
Wants to set people’s expectation of him low so he can get away with doing very little
Happy that he successfully diverted his embarrassing nickname to someone else
Compiles a list of bad words that a robot shouldn’t say (they do not reveal the actual list)
Thinks it’s dumb to be yourself
Makes a cartoon called “Stew Pid”
Didn’t set the record straight when his friend took the fall for something that he did

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