Bakugan or Enid Blyton?

BY Namitha Dipak| IN Opinion | 19/01/2009

The thing with parenting these days is that the Erma Bombeck (the American humorist well known for her newspaper column that described suburban home life humorously) moments come too fast and too frequently, often leaving us too gob-smacked to be prepared for the next one. And more often than not the flashpoints are connected to the media, directly or indirectly. 

What is the line a parent should take about computer use, Internet surfing, just how many of those Bakugan (action-figure warriors) toys can we afford to buy without seriously eating into the monthly budget; is it alright for a kid to play cell-phone games when he is "bored", and how much TV is too much for an eight-year-old? And what if he goes over to the neighbour¿s house and does all these forbidden things anyway? As a matter of fact, do both parents have a joint line of thought on these issues at all?  

To use media parlance, we never had this bouquet of offerings when we were growing up. It was always just books, the radio, and some TV. (Although growing up in Kenya in the 1970s, there was more choice on TV than in India, including some of those popular serials like the ¿Muppet Show¿, and those out-of-bounds ones like ¿Dallas¿, which I watched anyway with the volume turned down. OK, so I was impish too!). 

"Who is Enid Blyton?" asked my eight year old a few days ago, although he was a big fan of the TV serial ¿Noddy¿, when he was younger. (Well, I guess that¿s the fate of most people who have had their literary work turned into a film, except perhaps, if they are J.K. Rowling…) He listened patiently to my spiel about the wonderful world of Enid Blyton books before launching into one of his own about the wonderful world of Bakugan and how much he wanted ¿prayers¿ to add to his collection. Yes, dear, said his grandmother, you must pray; prayers are good for everyone. No, he said, I want a PREYAS. Who or what is a preyas? we wanted to know; and guess what? He asked us to look up the Internet for an instant answer.

These days, children can have their cake, and eat it too. Literally, because many of these cartoon characters are churned up as birthday cakes by the local bakeries. The merchandising spillover from some of these television serials, advertisements and movies is so insidious that even if the child does not watch TV, or go to the movies, the visual bombardment with bags, water bottles, toys, pencil boxes, cheap coin sized plastic giveaways with packets of snacks and biscuits,  plastic Dracula teeth and such like, acts as some sort of subliminal pull, endorsed by peers in the neighbourhood, and at school,  gradually increasing the whispers and mutterings to full-fledged aural assaults that refuse to die down until some demand is met. 

How does a worldly-wise and otherwise capable adult cope with this advertising onslaught and its impact on young children, which at its simplest level can truly ruin a perfectly good day, and at its extreme level, well, can lead to other worrying events?  

In those heady days of early parenthood, we simply took the decisions ourselves. We stopped trips to Macdonald¿s  to avoid those meals with the hidden cost of that wonderful bit of plastic merchandise which did not make us feel happy at all. Then, when our son grew older.  it was possible to make him understand (agree reluctantly?) that the ephemeral happiness of getting a plastic toy which he refused to look at the next day, and which did not even break or disintegrate, was simply not worth it, and only if he didn¿t insist on this toy we could go there. Happily, this worked wonders, and we hardly go there but twice a year now. Then I objected to films that were positioning products, especially after ¿Krrish¿ – I thought it was outrageous to be expected to pay for expensive tickets and the extras like stale popcorn, fizzy drinks with suspect ice cubes and somehow endure the movie itself….  and then be forced to watch plugs for commercial products within the script. Talk about captive audiences! So we eschewed movie theatres, except on very rare occasions for child-friendly movies, settling instead on home videos for other occasional interesting ones that were not worth a trip to the theatre.

Then came an advanced phase when we worried whether too much of the do¿s and don¿ts would repress the child, and lead to serious emotional problems later on. (Yep, we do catch up on parenting websites occasionally!). All those do¿s and don¿ts that I seemed to be sprinkling around, also made me feel like a very unfriendly monster quite like something in those serials he watched, and I¿d seriously begun to have concerns about whether he would grow up hating his mother.  I¿m not aware if anyone has written a treatise on what depriving an eight year old of a Bakugan might do, but anyway, we thought we¿d say yes to some things to cope with that factor. So, last year¿s birthday party was held at one of those pizza places, complete with two standard games, and the bonus of Mr. Cheese coming and handing out balloons. Being the control freak that I am, I insisted on two games of our own being played during the party, and handed out a disclaimer that it did not mean that we would be doing this every year. 

Still, for all my aggressive parenting and party-pooper ways, I get the feeling that I can run, but I can¿t hide. Every generation has been through these parent-child interactions, these attempts to gain and establish boundaries and control mechanisms… although frankly, on bad days, it feels like shifting boundaries on shifting sands. One reason is that our situation is so different from what it was when we were young, so we don¿t even have some kind of vague blueprint about how our parents coped. The most disturbing aspect to the parent-child interactions these days is the commercial overtone and its link to immediate gratification. The other confounding aspect is that we need to have our facts and explanations in place to cope with the post-refusal wheedling thanks to our more relaxed parenting styles, whereas our parents¿ word usually brooked no argument. To add another complex layer over all this, the news coverage that we get is both useful, and worrying at the same time. News items like the ones on Yahoo (January 14, 2009) about  a teenager in the USA convicted of killing his mother and wounding his father, because they took away a video game from him, add to the concerns of parents, and give a sense of urgency to find methods to cope on a family and community basis.  In a sense we are both a hostage and beneficiary of the media, and perhaps learning to cope maturely with the sensory inputs is the key. Prayers might help too.