Shall we say children are hereditary?

By Rohan Manav

JAKARTA (JP): It is no longer a man's world. Nor a woman's. Today our world is in the puissant fist of our kids.

Children in my day led uncomplicated unpampered lives. They were polished off with last night's leftovers that were disguised with a layer of ketchup or cheese, or some equally versatile food camouflage. The cakes that went flat on their faces were served a-la-cake-crumble with ice cream by an economical mother with a shrewd attitude towards prodigal squandering of food.

Earlier on, kids inherited their siblings hand-me-downs or even their parents' clothes which a futuristic grandmother had lovingly preserved. The highlight of their life was a new pair of shoes for the new year. Today if my son is not in his Power Ranger shoes with matching socks sporting a Power Ranger T-shirt we can't go out in public. An asthmatic panic creeps among parents telling them if the voracious materialistic appetite of their kids is not satiated they will grow up feeling psychoanalytically deprived.

I remember playing football with a ball of discarded wool and regarding the group that played with the real thing the same as kids today would regard the Chicago Bulls or the Lakers. We just ran around and kicked that lifeless string with all our inexhaustible energy. Today's children have more style. They get into helmets, knee pads, elbow pads and palm pads just to ride their bicycles.

I am not afraid of our world being taken over by aliens but by our own fast-lipped, sagacious, highbrowed, genetically advanced kids. Mothers who breast-fed their babies and then swung them onto the rug to play with a rattle are now refurbishing their own gray cells to decipher the complex instruction leaflet that accompanies the educational toys. Effectively baffling are the array of educational toys that cram store shelves. They are supposed to mentally stimulate your child's brain, make him an early learner, or construct her into an Einstein by the time she is five.

Birthdays should be called "birth months". Right from the time a child finishes tearing the wrapper off his last birthday gift, he starts planning his next one. Birthdays (if remembered) used to be a family affair with a few relatives and close friends thrown in. A cake, a few eats and a present was it. Last month, on my son's fifth birthday, I wore a hand stitched silver space suit as I handed out the ice-cream. My enduring spouse stood at the lemonade corner shouting, "Elixir from Mars". She had elongated putty ears, her eyebrows shooting upwards at a 45- degree-angle for a rendezvous with her hairline. We were Mr. and Mrs. Spock, and our son was throwing a space-age party. We really did feel out of this world.

Theme parties are in, with each imaginative parent coming up with championship winning themes. There was even a red party where even the mayonnaise had red food coloring mixed in it.

What happened to children who helped their parents in old age? Now they just help them reach it faster.

Parents adhere to psychologist's declarations that if they fight against the tide to save their child from the rampant globalization of today's civilized world, they run the risk of making their kid feel deserted, deprived, denuded and divested, which will turn the youngsters into manic depressives, psychopaths, schizophrenics, hypochondriacs, and pill-popping deviants.

Only time will tell, as each generation is born into adulthood, only then can we actually estimate what went right and what went wrong.

This whole issue can actually be structurally eschewed by the one essential truth: Kids are hereditary, and if your parents didn't have any, chances are, you won't either.