Spring Break
20-something college guy tells you how to raise your kids
Ryan Nowell
Issue date: 3/4/09 Section: Opinion
Experts (i.e. me wearing my high school mortarboard) estimate that most instances of young college students making snap judgments about a total stranger's parenting skills occur while standing in line. So let's start there, shall we?
I was picking up a few odds and ends at one of those cavernous all-in-one grocery/department stores, the giant hangar kind where commerce parks all the lower-middle class schwag.
Waiting at one of the two open checkout counters, pondering what the other 20 empty registers are for, I overheard a young boy partaking in the time-honored tradition of begging for a toy. The parent refused, but not for the reasons you'd think (money, neglected chores, because I said so, etc.). They wouldn't buy it because the toy the kid had picked out was a bad guy. Parent's words.
Now, this being an action figure, bad guy is meant in the overt, mustache-twirling, Bond villain sense. How it usually works is that you have your multicultural cast of wholesome and generic good guys, fighting to uphold a set of values so ill-defined that no one could ever take issue with them (freedom, anyone?), and then you have your scowling, deplorable bad guys who sit around hatching nonsensical schemes to prove how evil they are (Subtlety 101 not having been offered at Cobra Community College).
So has this become a thing? Are parents really demanding moral resoluteness from their children's adolescent play worlds?
It's certainly debatable whether this kind of dumb action fare is good for them at all -- fostering early didactic thinking and all that -- but refusing your kid a toy because of the villainous back-story the fellas in marketing cooked up seems more symptomatic of black and white thinking than preventative of it.
Telling your kid that they aren't allowed to have this toy or that one because it's a plastic depiction of a bad guy not only validates this crude way of thinking in utterly good and entirely bad terms but also begs the larger question of whether you're doing them any favors by "protecting" them from such low-risk bad influences.
I was picking up a few odds and ends at one of those cavernous all-in-one grocery/department stores, the giant hangar kind where commerce parks all the lower-middle class schwag.
Waiting at one of the two open checkout counters, pondering what the other 20 empty registers are for, I overheard a young boy partaking in the time-honored tradition of begging for a toy. The parent refused, but not for the reasons you'd think (money, neglected chores, because I said so, etc.). They wouldn't buy it because the toy the kid had picked out was a bad guy. Parent's words.
Now, this being an action figure, bad guy is meant in the overt, mustache-twirling, Bond villain sense. How it usually works is that you have your multicultural cast of wholesome and generic good guys, fighting to uphold a set of values so ill-defined that no one could ever take issue with them (freedom, anyone?), and then you have your scowling, deplorable bad guys who sit around hatching nonsensical schemes to prove how evil they are (Subtlety 101 not having been offered at Cobra Community College).
So has this become a thing? Are parents really demanding moral resoluteness from their children's adolescent play worlds?
It's certainly debatable whether this kind of dumb action fare is good for them at all -- fostering early didactic thinking and all that -- but refusing your kid a toy because of the villainous back-story the fellas in marketing cooked up seems more symptomatic of black and white thinking than preventative of it.
Telling your kid that they aren't allowed to have this toy or that one because it's a plastic depiction of a bad guy not only validates this crude way of thinking in utterly good and entirely bad terms but also begs the larger question of whether you're doing them any favors by "protecting" them from such low-risk bad influences.
Be the first to comment on this story