CSotD: Which Reminds Me …
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That was exactly my response when I got my first pair of glasses in third grade. I had just assumed that, at a distance, trees looked like drawings of trees: A big blob of green, and you weren’t supposed to be able to see the leaves unless you got closer.
And then Ben tossed another, much later, memory my way.
This is good parenting. Instead of assuming you know what it is, you say, “Tell me about your picture.” It starts a conversation and you’ll avoid declaring their elephant to be a doggy.
There are, however, limits. The year I dropped out of college to write, I tried out for a job at a daycare place where the kids were not just expected to be self-directed but where it was verboten to give them any direction at all. I failed because I played with them.
The kids liked it, but the director accused me of “structuring their dramatic play,” which became a family catch-phrase for any time we gave our boys the slightest suggestion.
I remember one parent picking up his kid, and the kid had a piece of construction paper on which he’d smeared some paint and then stuck on a cotton ball, and I could see his father aching to ask him what it was but aware that if he got caught structuring his son’s artistic efforts he’d get kicked out and would have to find another place to park him during the workday.
The place gave me a whole new insight into “watching the kids.” You could watch, but you weren’t allowed to interact with them. Fortunately, it was on a quiet street, because if they wandered out into traffic, I think you were expected to let them learn about cars on their own.
OTOH, I’ll admit that “Tell me about your picture,” while somewhat directive, is better than “What the hell is that?”
Another blast from my past. Like Lio, I thought a box of magic tricks would turn me into Victor Frankenstein if not Mandrake but since I never bothered to read the instructions, I was stuck with a collection of plastic cups and little foam rubber rabbits. And kudos to my parents for pretending to be mystified by my attempts at astonishing foolery.
However, jump forward about 35 years or so, because elder son got a job at Zeezo’s, a costume and magic shop in Colorado Springs. He was only 14, so Zeezo couldn’t legally hire him, but in return for helping around the place, he’d get not just free magic tricks but instruction on how to use them.
One thing Zeezo taught him was to add some mild insults to his patter, because if you made the mark a little angry, he’d lose focus and would more readily fall for whatever up-close trickery you were pulling off.
This was a lesson that had a lot of applications beyond magic tricks.
A different kind of magic from Bravo. The Intertubes were still somewhat new when I began working with kids, teaching media literacy and political cartooning and so forth, and schools had some pretty clumsy internet firewalls. IIRC, one of the leading ones was called Net Nanny and was intended to keep them from looking up porn, but was so clumsy that they also couldn’t look up breast cancer or chicken parts.
It did teach them to use their imaginations, mind you. I was trying to work between classes at one high school and couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the computer. Finally realized somebody had changed the typeface to white so you couldn’t see it. And you couldn’t see the recipe for marijuana brownies that was on the screen.
It’s going to be interesting to see how yesterday’s agreement between Meta and the states that sued them for exploiting children actually work out. Australia and a few other countries are already finding the weak spots in laws intending to keep kids off-line until they’re older, but supposedly Facebook and Instagram are going to cooperate this time.
We’ll see.
This Bizarro brought back the memory of when the Archie Bunker Rule broke down in our family. The Archie Bunker Rule was that nobody who would not be allowed in through the front door was allowed to come in through the television and I knew damn well that the boys were seeing Beavis and Butthead over at their friends’ houses, but I insisted on establishing values in ours.
Then I saw Ren and Stimpy, and admitted defeat, because as raucous and rude as they were, they were hilarious and I wanted to watch them myself.
Moment of Insight: The first Beavis and Butthead T-shirt I ever saw was on a high school kid when I was touring his class through the paper. He and his buddy were hanging back, whispering and giggling, and I’d despaired of them learning anything until we got into the pressroom and I started explaining how it worked. The kid with the T-shirt whispered something, but his buddy gave him an elbow in the ribs and said, “Shut up. I want to hear this.”
The kids are all right.
I’m not sure why Toro’s father and son look like they stepped out of the ’30s, given that they’re talking about semi-current technology, but I’m glad to have gotten through most of my parenting before it was everywhere.
When I went to college, it was a case of having been given roots and wings. I wrote home from time to time and phoned once in awhile, but I was gone. With the boys, I did suggest they find places where they could come home on a three-day weekend if they wanted, but weren’t so close that I was doing their laundry.
Now it seems that the helicopter parents are turning into drone parents and those apron strings are tighter and tighter than ever.
Then again, when I got my first cell phone, back at the dawn of time, I said something to one of the boys about not wanting people to be able to call me all the time and he said, “Don’t give people your number.”
Apron strings are a choice. And they always have been.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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