FastLittleArticle

In retrospect, it ought to have been easily predictable – or what philosophers like to call overdetermined – but one of the consequences of having a child is that I watch a lot of children’s television. I know several parents of young children who prevented this by banning the box. This tells you something about the social circles I move in, and perhaps I’ll take a closer look at the history of that impulse another time. But getting rid of the TV feels false to me, too deliberately countercultural. At the other extreme, we’ve all heard that bad and lazy parents leave their children to learn the world according to PBS preschool programming. What I want to know is how they keep them there, in front of the TV, instead of badgering their mothers for toys, apple juice, and to play on the computer. I’d be happy enough to leave my child in the secure glowing embrace of the TV so that I could, say, brush my hair, or tend to this website. But he wants me to watch with him. So we sit on the couch, and I try to hold up a magazine, and wonder if a wireless internet connection and a laptop would be compatible with a lap full of toddler. Magazines are no defense against the onslaught of moral instruction issuing from the TV.

My favourite is Arthur (or it was until I learned about Peep and the Big Wide World, narrated by the excellent Joan Cusack). Arthur looks nothing like the aardvark he is supposed to be. Are aardvarks too phallic? Who knows? The animals in children’s literature and television are rarely much like their natural counterparts. They are fuzzy stand-ins for the children themselves. (This is fitting; children often seem to be a species apart.) Arthur wears its moral philosophy lightly, and the relationships between the kids show an unusual degree of faith in actual childhood as the source material for children’s entertainment. Arthur’s little sister D.W., for example, sees a deer on a family camping trip, and imagines how she will be innocent and good enough to attract the animal as her friend, crossing whatever sort of species boundary that might be. The deer will sleep in her bed and let her ride on its back. What child hasn’t had a similar fantasy about a foreign creature who can confirm how special she is? Of course, D.W. drives her parents crazy in her pursuit of this fantasy, which is the other reason I like the show. The parents are not fonts of wisdom. They roll their eyes and drop the kids off with grandma in complete exasperation. They seem to have – or at least want – a life apart from their demanding offspring.

Arthur is not free of moral lessons – one of its more subtle and constant ones is that Dad is a caterer and Mom is an accountant – but these don’t generally get in the way of the characters or storylines. And it gets bonus points for its Ziggy Marley theme song. There’s a lot of music and singing on kiddie TV, and much of it is pretty annoying to adult ears. Ziggy is a brief respite.

What is the effect of all these sounds and images on our children’s aesthetic development? Children are supposed to prefer simple sounds just as they are attracted to primary colours. But how much of this is because that’s all they ever hear and see? My husband and I each have programs that irritate us enough to hunt for the remote, switch the channel, turn off the TV, search for some other diversion. Interestingly, they are not the same programs. He will always switch from Hi-5 to Dragon Tales if he catches the impossibly perky hosts of the first show chirping away. He has a point – but I find Dragon Tales almost as annoying, and I will sacrifice my son’s aesthetic development to just about anything if it means I get to finish my coffee.

Hi-5 is the American version of a successful Australian show, filmed on the Australian set with an American cast. The cast is sparkly of eye and bleached of tooth and has been hygienically sealed for your protection. I found at first that it was impossible not to watch their song-and-dance without imagining all those bright faces with their progressive double-barrelled surnames in seedy after-hours clubs, disappearing into dark corners with strangers, wrapping rubber bands around their arms in preparation for the next heroin injection, or, like Doogie Howser in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, snorting coke off a prostitute’s pretty rear end. But the cast bios spoiled this bit of fun. It seems that the happyhappy cast are just musical theatre geeks. (Not that musical theatre geeks can’t get into trouble or be dangerously competitive – see the film Camp if you’re not familiar with this subspecies from high school.) The Hi-5 bios also list favourite foods, movies, and other likes and dislikes. It’s the same genre as the personal ad, and perhaps has the same purpose – to get strangers to like them. As clichéd as they are (Kimmee loves “PASTA! PASTA! PASTA!”), they make me more inclined to take the show’s frantic good will at face value.

More disturbing is the uncanny mimicry of the child studio audience. The girls, particularly, none of whom seem to be over the age of six, can execute every shoulder move and hip shimmy with perfection, as they sing the words, “Cover your eyes/Whisper my name/Join in my mystical game” (from the song “Three Wishes”). What looks like a well-meaning exaggeration of childhood on the part of the performers looks creepy and weird when done by actual children.

However, at least they manage to fill the studio, or film it so that the studio looks full. The early episodes of the execrable Canadian show The Doodlebops were never quite able to accomplish that, and it was impossible not to notice the vast numbers of empty seats and the number of times particular audience shots repeated themselves. This likely won’t be a problem in the future. Just like it is for the best Japanese girl groups, the publicity machine is now fully cranked up for the cartoonish trio, with a cross-Canada tour and mainstream press coverage. And so far, their audiences seem to be blessedly free of rhythm and ability.

The worst shows, of course, are the heavy-handed moralizers that my son loves. Poko, for instance, according to the show’s website, “is a stop-motion animation preschool show that will have young children glued to their seats and laughing out loud, while at the same time learning simple strategies to help them cope with everyday childhood frustrations and mishaps.” Poko, who seems to come from forward-thinking multi-racial parents (although they are never in evidence), learns to count to ten and perform other little exercises until his anger dissipates. Then the narrator (who sounds a great deal like Hal from the movie 2001) says to Poko, “Good, Poko, you’re not angry anymore. Now what do you think you should do to solve the problem?” The narrator is the superego, squashing the id’s urge to just throw the frustrating toy out the window, forcing the ego to behave morally. It’s a pretty straightforward exercise in popular Freudianism, this show, and makes me appreciate a little more Maurice Sendak’s beloved Where the Wild Things Are. (Although that’s another book that I have trouble reading in any kind of uncomplicated way. Have you read it as an adult? You should.)

The overall lessons that come from these shows – driven home with all the subtlety of a jackhammer – is that (1) you need to be nice to others, and (2) if you believe in yourself you can do anything. There is a subset of (1) that is especially apparent in the shows that are based on the children’s books from my own childhood, like Little Bear or The Berenstain Bears, which is that Parents Know All. The grinding repetition of this is especially apparent in The Berenstain Bears. I don’t remember this from my own childhood, but my mother assures me that the Berenstain Bear books (there are now more than 240 of them) were always big on various lessons in self-control and self-reliance. There are issues they don’t cover. In an interview with CBS news in 2002, Stan Berenstain said that they weren’t going to do a book about divorce: “Who’s going to get divorced? Mama and Papa Bear can’t get divorced, or we’d be out of business. I guess the neighbors could get divorced, but one of the things kids respond to is that the bears are just like us and they’re funny. It would be pretty hard to do a funny book about divorce.” Well, actually, I think you could write a funny book about divorce fairly easily, but doing that for children might tread on any number of feelings and sensibilities. In any case, there’s no shortage of heartfelt and tedious children’s books on divorce out there, and perhaps I should find the Bears’ moral world bracingly old-fashioned. But Junk Food is Bad and Exercise is Good are neither time-tested nor especially interesting.

Everyone makes fun of the Baby Einstein videos (no doubt because the name implies the kind of striving that we simultaneously practice and scorn), but I am a convert. (Yes, I made fun of them before I had children. They are also owned by the evil Disney empire. And I’m sorry to have to tell you that calling them ‘baby crack’ is not especially original.) It’s the looseness of their narrative structure and the lack of moral to the story that allow them shelf space in my house. The background music - classical music played straight but on toy instruments - is rather pleasant, and not at all like the disco “Hooked on Classics” that I had feared. Sometimes it’s funny, too. The colour purple, for instance, is introduced with Ravel’s Bolero. Of course, the normative lessons are still there. Martha Stewart Living doesn’t have a patch on the idyll and nostalgia that suffuses the footage of the kitchens and bedrooms in “Baby Wordsworth,” which introduces words around the house.

But the majority of children’s television can’t shake itself from the idea that it must teach children to be good and productive. Most troubling is this idea that if you believe in yourself you can do anything. Why do we teach this to our children? Vicarious hopes? It is the most frequent lesson in children’s television, and it is probably the one that we question the least. Obviously, telling kids that they are bound by ability, geography, and parental income is needlessly cruel. But just what is at stake for the grown-ups in repeating this little falsehood over and over? Perhaps it salves our collective conscience, makes us feel that we’ve done something. Disseminate the message and turn control of their lives over to these small ones. It’s not our fault that your school is shockingly poor. Don’t you know that you can do anything if you believe in yourself? Or maybe it is important that we repeat this lesson to the most vulnerable children, who perhaps badly need to hear it from an authoritative voice. But it needs to be coupled with something practical – school funding, summer camps – in order for it ever to have any kind of real effect. You weren’t able to do what you wanted? Well, kiddo, you just didn’t believe in yourself enough.

What a striking contrast these pastel pieties are with Peter Rabbit, whose father was turned into a charmingly illustrated pie, or with Mother Goose:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
If turnips were watches, I would wear one by my side.

Posted by Katharine on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006 at 9:30 am.