We’re bad parents too. Or so the common wisdom goes.
She likes Happy Meals. She knows pretty much every major “character” or “movie” or whatever… “Home on the Range, dada!”… “Look, Daddy - Elmo!” (and we don’t even watch Elmo?)…“Dora!” She loves, loves, loves going to the mall - it is easily her favorite thing to do. She watches far more than the “recommended” amount of TV a day, and not all of it is stuff for kids - Mommy has a list of “safe” Buffy episodes (including the musical, to which Sophie sings along), and Daddy has no problem turning the TV to “Police Chase Videos” or the news while Sophie is in the room. She has her favorite CD’s (including Barney), her favorite movies (the Lion King), her favorite junk food (popcorn. And ice cream, always ice cream with children. Pure heaven.) She likes eating out. She likes wasting her time on the swings at the parks, she like combing the hair of her “My Pretty Pony” (and Sophie calls it “My Pretty Pony”), she much prefers the singing styles of current 14 year-old teenybopping girls more than 18th-century sopranos (tested), she is big, wholesome, and corn-fed.
The common wisdom is this: Modern culture, American culture is bad. Simplistic, wasteful, damn near moronic. Hollywood is shallow. Pop/Rap/Country music is vapid and has always sucked. They don’t write books like they used to, they don’t make movies like they used to, they don’t blah, blah, blah mindless consumerism, blah, blah, blah. Caring parents do all they can to shield their child from these horrible influences, all the better if they do so by scheduling their 3 year-old to all sorts of various activities (“Two is not too young for ballet, is it dear?”)*, loser parents take their kids to McDonalds on their way to the movies, ensuring that, “Yes, I need the Hello Kitty toy that is not a toaster - we already have 3 of those!”
Poppycock! (Sorry for the language, but this isn’t the Pit, you know. 
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We live in a rich and varied culture, we Americans, one continually enriched and made anew by our gift of assimilation, from the “blandness” of McDonalds to the spiciness of Cajun cooking, to the simplicity of “Titanic” to the quirkiness of “Big Fish”, from Bing Crosby to P. Diddy, modern American culture is the most diverse and widespread of national cultures in the history of the planet, it’s only challenger in scale would be the English, but not in diversity. From motion pictures to modern (post-1955) music to television to even sports (especially baseball and basketball), America has largely been the pace-setter worldwide in these forms, and even those that we haven’t (say, theatrical productions), we’ve still done some quality work.
And it’s odd, saying this, because I was one of those twenty-somethings, the one’s who knew everything about parenting, who could actually utter the words “My child will…” without realizing how… inexperienced and naive I sounded. And I vowed that my kid would never watch Barney, that I would be reading (get this!) Ayn Rand to her by their second year (pardon me while I castigate myself: :smack: . Thanks.), that the house would be peaceful, with Mozarts piano concertos lightly playing in the background, my two-year old and I carefully going through the flash cards as we both were learning… some other language (I never had which language quite clear). I was even against perpetuating the “Santa Claus myth”, declaring in the sort of intellectual smugness only a 24 year-old could muster, that lying to our child will do her more harm than… seeing all her friends get presents year after year while she doesn’t, I guess.
:smack: :wally
:rolleyes:
:wally !
Somewhere along the line I remembered - I went to McD’s, I did the Santa Claus thing, I knew all the cartoons that were on (this was the mid-seventies, though, so nowhere near as many as today), I read comic books rather than Tolstoy (or Ayn Rand), saw Star Wars and paid no attention to Annie Hall (hated it, actually, for having the temerity to beat the Greatest Movie of All Time for B. Picture), spent my summers riding bikes and visiting grandparents rather than Reading Camp or Karate school and, well, I turned out OK.
As will Sophie.
She lives a happy life, one where she is told constantly (and I mean hourly, more) how much she is loved and appreciated, how fun she is, and how much happier we are with her in our lives. She is an extraordinarily friendly child, one who has no qualms about walking up to strange children and saying “Hi, I’m Sophie.” She has parents that adore her, she lives in a world pleasant, interesting, knowledgable, and mostly friendly, she wakes up each morning eager to get out of bed… and a large part, possibly the large part of that is the nation and culture that she’s in.
My daughter is an American. As long as it’s legal, I don’t care what she becomes - bra burning lesbian, loving housewife, career woman (or hell, all three - why not?) But, regardless, she is still an American, and to me that implies a few things about the attitude that she should take to in life: optimism, friendliness, confidence, and yes, a pursuit of happiness… and it shows in our entertainment, especially our children’s entertainment.
*I remember thinking that it would be cool to “raise a Mozart”… until I learned that it’s a lot easier being “Mozart” when your father is one of the premiere violin instructors outside Vienna than when your old man can’t even tell you which key is which on a piano without having to think about it.
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