I didn’t say that the kid was acting. I said he’s being trained as an actor. There’s a difference.
On the contrary, I think it is an apt comparison. For babies, separation anxiety is a serious problem. By the time the child is four or five years old, he should be able to cope with a brief separation without panic. Look at the ad again. This kid isn’t hysterical. He isn’t screaming, or cowering in the corner. The tears I see in that commercial are like the tears I’ve seen on my children’s faces when they’ve lost a toy or gotten scratched by the cat. A few minutes of reassurance and they forget all about it.
This shouldn’t be a serious problem for a kid that age.
That’s true. By that rationale, those experiments where mothers were separated from their children to test separation anxiety in kids would be abuse as well.
The interesting question here is - what is a good or valid reason to inflict mild distress on a small child? Given that enormous numbers of parents inflict similar levels of unhappiness on their preschoolers on a daily basis by such actions as taking them to childcare or preschool, making them apologise to their sibling for nicking a toy, or informing them that they’re out of cornflakes, or they can’t wear the green jumper because it’s in the wash.
Clearly, a lot of reasons why we make our children unhappy are “good reasons”. We’re teaching them good character by insisting they apologise for wrongdoing or not buying the sweetie they whinged for at the supermarket. We leave them at childcare so we can go work and put a roof over their heads. We let them out on the playground where they might skin their knees so they don’t turn into couch potatoes.
Is making a PSA to convince people not to smoke a “good reason”? If not, why not? Convincing people not to suck nicotine into their lungs is generally considered a reasonably good cause - obviously there are different opinions about whether that particular ad is effective but presumably the makers of the ad are trying to make it as effective as possible, and that’s a good thing.
Is making the kid cry for thirty seconds to make an ad for a cause many people believe quite strongly in really worse than making him cry for thirty seconds because you told him TV time’s over now and turned off the cartoons?
It wan’t just separation, it was sudden abandonment. Those were tears of confusion and fear. Would you ditch your kid in the middle of a crowded mall just to make him cry for a camera?
Because smoking is not his problem and not his responsibility to stop, and because he has no ability to make a choice in the matter.
Yes, and the comparison to turning off the TV is asinine. Turning off the TV does not involve the betrayal of trust and infliction of terror that abandoning him in a train station does. I can’t believe anybody even needs to be told that.
I understand what you’re saying, Dio, and it would make an interesting segue into the overall appropriateness of child actors, but…
It was sudden abandonment in a strange place when I left my kids the first day of nursery school, the first time I left them at a babysitter’s house, the first time I put them to bed in our new home after we moved, and so forth. Over the course of our children’s lives, they learn to separate themselves from us slowly, over dozens or hundreds of individual events.
Yes, I see a difference with this one (the train station is a different environment than a nursery school), but I can tell you my kids cried longer and harder than that the first day of school. It’s just not that big a deal.
I can see your ethical argument against this, but since the child’s emotions are a normal part of childhood, I really don’t see the outrage. As others have said, though the terror is real, it is fleeting, and a part of normal childhood development. Would you have felt differently about it if they had filmed this from a bunch of kids just dropped off at daycare? (That is, same emotion, but induced for reasons other than making a PSA.)
ETA: Re-reading your posts, I think you would. You appear to believe that the child’s emotions are different in this case than mere separation anxiety, while I and others think they are the same. I don’t know how to test that without traumatizing more children.
Well, I remember reading in psych classes about experiments with kids (I think younger) who were left in rooms with their mothers and observed (how they explored, etc.) with the mother, and then observed when the mother left. Normal, well adjusted kids got upset when the mother left and cried. Then when she came back, they were fairly easily soothed. Kids who weren’t as bonded didn’t get upset when she left and then others got really upset when she came back, almost angry. Is that a cruel experiment?
It’s not a valid comparison. It’s not about the separation per se, it’s about the betrayal of trust inherent in a sudden, inexplicable abndonment in a very frightening environment. The kid in the room also knows his mom is coming back. That makes a huge difference.
There’s no difference. When toddlers are first taken to childcare they don’t understand that they’ll be left there and they don’t understand you’ll be back to get them. They will cry, and it’s no different from them being left alone anywhere else.
I personally wouldn’t leave my child alone just to get them to cry for camera, but I wouldn’t do anything else to do with television either. I wouldn’t take my children to auditions to be child actors, it’s not that I have a moral problem with it, it just doesn’t interest me.
I would, and have, left my child alone in a crowded shopping centre because they were being silly and wouldn’t follow us out to the car. We said, alright, we’ll leave without you, and we walked off and hid around a corner where we could see her but she couldn’t see us. She would’ve felt just the same as the child in the commercial.
I’m not Dio, but I’ll answer differently. It’s ETHICALLY different. When you drop a child off at daycare, you warn the child ahead of time (unless you’re a complete dick), and the pain caused the child is to the child’s benefit. This kid didn’t get any benefit from being abandoned, however fleetingly.
And to those who say it was only for a few seconds: do you realize how long that seems to a four-year-old?
ETA: And the remark about method acting is simple bullshit. Method acting involves an ADULT searching his or her memories for situations similar to that which being presented in a dramatic work so that the emotions may be better simulated. This was HURTING A KID for no good reason.
If your kid was of a comparable age to the one in the ad, then that was a shitty thing to do, and it tells me that I’d be wasting my time trying to convince you there’s any ethical distinction between dropping a kid at daycare and making him think he’s been abandoned at a train station.
Well, I wasn’t completely serious. Any child of that age is too young to act, period. She/he’s either reacting to stimuli, or following specific cues from an authority figure. I was making a joking comparison between the former and “method acting,” vs. the latter and more traditional methods.
Personally, I have my doubts about how ethical it is to have toddlers and young children on a professional set, full stop, though I understand the industry is pretty good about children’s working conditions. But as I am a childless nonsmoker and (apparently) a heartless bastard, at least in the abstract, I’ll bow out. (For the record, I actually quite like children, but tend to think our culture vastly overrates their fragility.)
No, I don’t have kids, but I remember being left by my parents and freaking out and getting over it.
Anyway, I don’t see how the kid in the room necessarily knows mom is coming back anymore than the kid in the crowd. I mean, they’re both new environments. And maybe they did explain what was going to happen to the kid ahead of time, but he still flipped out…the way kids just do even when they’re told they’ll be at day care or whatnot.
I’m with DoC on this one. Jarring the child like that is simply not fair. Yes, he’ll be fine, but you (general) would be fine if I posted a link to a screamer video and gave you a startle for my own amusement. And yet, that’s not allowed here. In fact, it would probably make you furious.
So, as a human with empathy, I am angry for that little boy who was startled on purpose by the very adults who should be protecting him.
From the article in the OP it sounds like they did explain it to the kid and hoped that he would act, and then he did really get upset anyways. Also, there must have been several cameras all nearby shooting him at once, so it’s not like they took him to a real train station and left him in the middle of a crowd and filmed with hidden cameras to make him think he was really abandoned. They must have explained it to him, but then once he got in the situation he really did get upset. Although I don’t think it was a great thing to do, I’d think this would be much less traumatic than really getting separated from your parents.