Shall we say children are hereditary?
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.