Today one of my young sons (three and a bit) was having a moment of frustration with his father’s stubbornness/stupidity/inflexibility, and trawled through his ever-expanding vocabulary for a phrase that might adequately convey his rage. Eventually, hands balled into determined little fists, he pronounced,? ‘You wrote a bad song, Petey.’ ?I laughed, and then he laughed, and the moment passed, as the childish moments do.
For those of you who don’t recognise the line, it’s from the brilliant film adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. It’s uttered by Michael Gambon, to the hapless folk singer (played by Jarvis Cocker, of Pulp fame) and is one of a series of superb moments in the film. If those are the sorts of insults my boys are going to settle upon when feeling fraught, I couldn’t be happier.
And that got me thinking about film, and television, and children. Our home is an increasingly common one, in that we have no television. We’re not anti-television, the likes of West Wing or The Wire have moments to match the very best from the world of film, theatre or literature. But one can buy DVDs, buy films online and use the computer for viewing, and that’s plenty for us. An occasional pleasure, rather than a part of the daily routine; none of the desperate popularity contest that network news has become, and with no idiot screaming out at you at regular intervals to get down to some shop or other and change your life. The balance feels about right.
And, without the big screen as a constant background companion, nothing to suck the young ones away from their worlds of construction and make believe. However, we’re a long long way away from being the sort who see the small screen as some sort of poison which children must be protected from.
Quite the opposite. I want my children to engage with story telling in every form. I want them to be read to, I want them to attend the theatre, to have sing-alongs, to spin endless yarns to one other, to improvise puppet shows and yes, watch films and television. Because some of the films being made for children today are simply remarkable. Engaging, challenging, inventive and so, so funny.
If you’re a parent, there’s also every chance you’ve watched your exhausted children sink into the couch at the end of a long day, while you take the moment to get dinner together, and felt the tiniest pang of something like guilt. Isn’t it wrong to plug your children into the screen in this way?
The answer, of course, is not even a little bit. To deprive them of the experience of television would be every bit as stupid and depriving them of the joy of books. Yes, one can watch too much television, and at some point that’s going to make you a fairly sad specimen, but then again one can read too many books, and that’s not going to do wonders for your engagement with the world either. You can do too much exercise and become a self absorbed idiot, you can be too careful with your food and develop an eating disorder… you get the point. Yet nobody suggests letting one’s child eat well, read or exercise is irresponsible. That would be insane. So why do we see television and film differently? (and we certainly seem to).To be honest, I don’t have much
idea.
Parenting seems to hit the ‘what if I’m doing this wrong?’ switch more powerfully than any other human activity. Television, then, is just one of a long list of bogey men, threatening to make disasters of your offspring and so cripple you with a lifetime’s guilt.
