It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it’s a pretty shitty joke to play on a little kid. The people who made the ad are assholes.
I would imagine that at least half, if not the vast majority of children going to daycare for the first time are below the age where it’s linguistically possible to explain what’s going to happen. And often after a few days/weeks when they start to figure out the pattern they actually become more distressed for a while. So I don’t think “warning” is an ethical difference.
As to the reason for the abandonment - well, usually kids are at childcare so the parents can go earn money. That kid was in the ad to (presumably) earn money. Not much difference there either.
What’s left, ethically? The impression that the distress was deliberately caused in order to make a better ad, rather than being an unfortunate and unwanted byproduct of the situation. As per the article (as cited by Waenera just now) I don’t believe that this is actually true. I think they did their level best to explain the situation to him, and the fact that his distress was real and not faked was accidental.
Given that, are they justified in making use of his real distress anyway? That I don’t know. The Milgram obedience experiments inflicted real distress on their subjects, and have been judged unethical and won’t be repeated. But we still use the results of those experiments. Are we wrong to do that?
I am not a big TV or movie watcher, but surely shows with kids in them regularly include crying scenes? How do they usually get those kids to cry? It may be ethically questionable, but I’d be surprised if it’s a unique situation at all. Anyone more media-savvy than I am care to comment?
Oh, right, because the concepts are so incredibly difficult that only persons with children could possibly understand them. If you only know what you’re talking about for things you’ve personally experienced, I assume from now on we’ll only hear you weighing in on topics about American white men.
If the director was not intentionally frightening the child for tears, as Waenera cited, then I don’t have an ethical problem with it after all. But it is hard to watch that little child become so obviously distressed.
She’s three and a half. I don’t see that it was particularly shitty. We gave her warning, we told her if she didn’t come with us to the car we’d go without her. She continued to push the boundaries so we stuck to our word, or at least appeared to. What should we have done? Smacked her? Just picked her up? That doesn’t teach her anything.
You have to realise that this is not an isolated incident but is part of a pattern of behaviour she’d been exhibiting. When we’d tell her not to do something, she’d very deliberately do it again while looking at us to see our reaction. When we tell her to hurry up, she’d slow down, and so on.
I was going to concede that the situations are different because the kid in the ad is being made to feel shitty for a cause that is unrelated to them, and that they have no say in it. But actually, they are being made to feel shitty because doing so will earn Mummy and Daddy some money and that will have benefits for the whole family, I don’t see the difference between this and putting a child into childcare so that Mummy and Daddy can go to work. After all, being in daycare can make a child feel like crap for the whole day if they don’t like it, and not all of them do.
On preview, Waenera’s cite makes your whole argument invalid.
On further preview I see most of my points have been made by others, I’m not sure why I didn’t read the last few posts.
I’m sorry for being judgmental. I was in an irritable mood at the time. I’ve certainly been there, done that with being at the end of my rope with a recalcitrant three-year-old. We’ve even used the “We’re going to leave without you” line, though we’ve never actually gone out their sights. I’ve been known to use some colorful language at times. Parenting is fucking hard. I shouldn’t be passing judgement on someone who’s doing their best. My apologies.
I’m positive that were you to do so, the child wouldn’t forget about it quickly. She’d be quite possibly traumatized and fear you (and other adult males similar in appearance) for a long time. A whole different ball game than leaving one’s child alone suddenly for thirty seconds. The latter happens dozens of times over an average happy childhood, the former doesn’t. IME as an once-abused father of small children living among loads of small children of friends and family.
Extremely good point, and I see that Dio has ignored it so far.
Dio, you look awfully hypocritical after that post–you post on a great many topics that you don’t have first-hand experience with.
Particularly on this topic where he’s where he’s talking about the psychological impact on the kid and Freudian Slit is a psychiatrist.
Hmm. If it is definitely real - as in the kid doesn’t know that it’s all fake - then I do modify my answer slightly. I don’t think it’s really necessary or right to make a kid cry for the purposes of a PSA.
But it seems like the kid knew - only he forgot.
Either way I don’t care much at all. It’s not the end of the world.
Sorry. 
I admit to having some prejudice against newspapers for various reasons.
Raising kids is like going to war – if you haven’t done it, you need to keep your fucking mouth shut about it. It’s not that the issues are “difficult,” it’s that the experience is not understandable if you haven’t done it. I’ll listen to anybody who’s done it. I won’t give anyone the time of day who hasn’t.
Bull.
Oh, bullshit. Raising children has absolutely zero to in common with going to war, though as far as that is concerned, it’s not like only those with combat experience have something valid to say about war, either.
Nice of you to set yourself up as the Great Arbiter of Other People’s Opinions, but you can hardly expect anyone else to grant you the authority to decide which POVs are valid and which are not – especially for such a completely stupid reason.
This controversy was brought up on the Today show as we were getting Bricker Jr. ready for school. He’s seven.
When he was three, he got separated from his mom and her brother in a department store. He was “missing” for less than a minute before they found him. We hadn’t talked with him about that incident in four years, nor has he ever brought it up before.
He watched the commercial, and as the kid starts to cry, he said to me, “Papito, I know exactly how he [the kid in the commercial] feels.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked him.
“Remember when I got lost at Burlington’s?” he said.
Way to totally misunderstand the point. I’m not saying the experiences are similar, I’m saying that they’re both unique in that no other life experience provides a frame of reference for understanding them anyway but directly.
Talking about war was not the comparison. Talking about GOING to war was the comparison. Non-parents runnung their mouths off to parents about child care is like a civilian trying to lecture a combat vet about being in a fire fight.
Reminds me of this cartoon:
It is a fallacy to believe that a person must go through an experience to understand it or have any opinion on an issue related to it. You don’t even believe this yourself.
There’s a quote from a Whitman poem that does a good job of encapsulating the idea that a person can make their mind up to understand other people’s experiences but I can’t find it. The whole of Song of Myself is a good illustration, though.
Heh I gotta go with Dio on this, to an extent - just looking back on myself pre-baby and post-baby, I know I was totally clueless even though I thought I knew something about it, having young cousins. It just isn’t the same.
Certainly a non-parent can have an opinion on parenting, but in general and assuming all things are equal I’d give it a lot less weight that the experience of a parent. Some experiences truly must be lived to be really understood, whatever Mr. Whitman may have said.
I used to mouth off some about parenting before I had kids. Now I know that I was an ignorant, babbling jackass.