NBC wore out my patience last week. It was Thursday, the night of the Olympic ice skating finals. My daughters (aged 11 and 4) were pretty excited.
Good ol’ NBC. They took their school-night coverage to midnight (EST). My four-year-old was asleep by 9:15. My eleven-year-old, dejected, went to bed at 10:10.
I realize females of all ages enjoy ice skating, but the floating princesses particularly appeal to little girls. Yet NBC expects them to stay up to midnight if they want to watch.
It’s not the first time children are expected to “take it like an adult.” The same thing happens with the baseball World Series and their night-time starts.
I also see marketers treating children like adults. Last year, my daughter (then aged 10) received a sample issue of a teeny-bopper magazine, in hopes she’d subscribe. My wife flipped through it and was shocked at the sex-driven content.
And it’s not just the media. I assume everyone heard about the six-year-old boy who was punished for “sexually” harassing another first-grader at school. The boy, of course, doesn’t even know what “sexual” is, but no matter: it was sexual harassment from an adult’s perspective, so that perspective was applied to the child.
Similarly, I see parents routinely letting their children watch R-rated movies. When the movie comes out on DVD, many (many, many) parents let their children watch. I see it in my middle-class social set all the time.
But on the flipside, children aren’t allowed to grow up. Colleges are having troubles with “helicopter parents,” those mothers and fathers who check on their kids every day at college and fly into campus at the smallest sign of trouble. Parents give their children cell phones as electronic umbilical cords and micro-manage their social lives and extra-curriculars. They drive their children everywhere, fearful that they can’t handle crossing the street on their bikes. They also give their children everything the kids ask for, hence fat little kids and spoiled teenagers with nice cars.
What’s with this schizophrenic approach to our children?
I honestly don’t know. Maybe we coddle them because we feel guilty about beating them, like Anna Quindlen, the careerist writer who famously wrote about making “guilt cookies” for her daughter when she leaves on business trips.
Or maybe it’s just a manifestation of what C.S. Lewis called the “great sin”: pride — a.k.a excessive self-regard, selfishness.
Both schizophrenic extremes described above, after all, cater to the desires of the adults.
The networks want better ratings, so they schedule the baseball players and ice skaters late at night — to heck with the children. The female magazines want readers, so they sauce-up their pages and send sample issues to young girls. The agenda-driven feminists want to find oppression at every level of society, so they pin a six-year-old boy with the label of “harasser.” The parents want to watch an R-rated movie, so they just let their children watch, too.
The same goes with the coddling. When it comes to “helicopter parents,” the college administrators say it’s a simple refusal of parents to let go of their children. The parents want to meddle. Parents also want to be involved in every aspect of their kids’ lives while they grow up. Parents also give into every demand of the children; after all, it’s easier than saying “no.” It works for the parent, and that’s all that matters anymore.
It’s not awfully surprising. Most adults have children out of a desire for the “experience.” Instead of a natural, God-given calling, children are another box on the Lifetime Fulfillment Checklist. Hence the tendency to have just one or two children — just enough to get the taste, but not enough to be an excessive burden or to interfere with other aspirations, like a great career, or splendid travel, or two SUVs.
It’s flat-out backwards, and it starts at the very beginning: in the decision to have children in the first place. Adults today have children when it’s convenient, when the children can be afforded, when the adults are ready to suspend travels for a few years. When, in general, their arrival best suits the preferences of the parents.
Parenthood, in other words, has become all about the parents. The rest of the adult world — from NBC to teenybopper magazines — just follows suit.
© Copyright 2006 Catholic Exchange
Eric Scheske is an attorney, the Editor of The Daily Eudemon, a Contributing Editor of Godspy, and the former editor of Gilbert Magazine.
