Do you remember when you were a young adult and you would see kids acting up, and you would think to yourself (or say out loud as one of my kids did) ‘My kids are never going to act that way’. And then in adulthood and parenthood you realize that is way easier said than done? You realize that there are some behaviors you have zero control over, like the overtired toddler I the grocery store who has had ENOUGH….and there are some things you do have control over, like how your children interact with and treat others as a habit of being.
In today’s world, with social media and extremely lax standards about what is shown on TV, parents must be very deliberate and parent actively, as in parent as a verb, not noun. Back when I was a kid the raciest thing I was going to see was Bert and Ernie cohabitating as special friends. Today we have to worry about twerking, licking lollipops that aren’t lollipops, and all sorts of other innuendo in addition to the downright adult content kids are exposed to in the media. And if we aren’t deliberate in our parenting by either having the conversations about appropriate for kids vs. inappropriate for kids, or even blocking them from those influences all together, we run the risk of ‘monkey see, monkey do’.
Back in the 90’s it was Angelica Pickles and Bart Simpson. As a young parent I didn’t immediately see the harm in letting the kids watch…after all, I grew up watching cartoons: smurfs, looney toons, pink panther….. but when I started noticing that my children began to sort of ‘adopt’ some of the values they were seeing in the cartoons, I had to put my foot down. When I started seeing my primary school aged children’s interactions with each other tainted with sarcasm, catch phrases ‘Bite me’ ala Bart, and the nasty voice ala Angelica we had our cable shut off, and we had many conversations.
I didn’t like seeing the representations of these negative character traits that were made light of in cartoon land manifesting in my children. I didn’t want them growing up thinking that treating your siblings poorly like Angelica was ever going to be ok, or being disrespectful to your parents, teacher and principal like Bart would ever be acceptable. I get it. It isn’t real life, and we can have conversations about this with our kids and tell them that in this make believe world, real people shouldn’t act like that.
Here we are 30 years later. I see so many Barts and Angelicas everywhere we go. Even worse, I see toddler kardashians, preschoolers posing for selfies with ducky lips and hips jutted out with sassiness to match. Kindergartener age kids shoulder checking each other….what?! Value systems that small children are adopting off the tv shows and cartoons, music videos, and you tube are not cute, not attractive, and are certainly not anything I want to spend my time around.
I often remind parents that one of the goals of raising children is that they grow up to be the kind of people that other people enjoy being around. I want my children’s company to be something that people look forward to, not something people dread. I want them to be welcomed into the homes of friends and family, and not be the kids that people are relived to see leave. I want my children to be welcomed into their friends homes, and respected by the adults around them.
While most of the characters that kids emulate on tv are only present for 30 minutes, our children are present for a lifetime. We want to make sure they are the kinds of people we want to be around, for a lifetime,
