Your Parents are also your Big Brother

Your Parents are also your Big Brother

Yeah, I'm 4. The world's pretty cool. The Wiggles are on TV. I can eat solid food (hot dogs in mayo are my favorite). I've managed to kick that nasty habit of eating things I find under the couch. I'm not crapping my pants anymore...although I've got a minor problem about peeing the bed. But I am out of the diapers. I'm making friends at pre-school. I'm beginning my athletic career by playing wee-ball each week. And I'm finding that technology's cool.

And then people start watching me through my teddy bear.

The teddy bear sitting in the corner of the child's room might look normal, until his head starts following the kid around using a face recognition program, perhaps also allowing a parent talk to the child through a special phone, or monitor the child via a camera and wireless Internet connection.

Yeah. That's what we need in our society. More means for parents to become even more distant and disconnected from their kids.

Now, I'm not a parent, so I'm sure that there's somebody reading this who's saying to themselves "this guy just doesn't know what parenting's all about."

Well, dare I say that it's not about ignoring your kid while you yell into a cellular phone. Kids love that. Knowing that that invisible person in the telephone is more important at that moment than they are.

It really bugs me, too, when I'm driving down the road and I look into the S.U.V. or the minivan next to me, and I see with the kids in the backseat glued to a DVD screen showing Power Rangers or SpongeBob, and up in the front seat, the parent's on their cell phone chatting busily to anybody BUT their kids? Does that shit bug anyone else? I mean, that's part of the time that my folks spent talking to me.

No, it's not all meaningful communication. But if there came a moment on one of those interminable trips from my house in Tennessee to my grandparents' in New Jersey that I needed to ask one of those important life questions (Where do babies come from?; why does the American League have the D.H.?; how is syrup different from jelly?), I knew that my folks would be there to answer those questions instead of screaming "Shut Ya Head I'm talking to the bastards at Work!"

It bugs me.

And now, we're gonna be able to shunt off the parenting to a teddy bear, who watches the kid while you work, and see what the bear sees and you're able to yell at the kid through the teddy bear.

Aren't we instilling this next generation with enough trust issues to fill up a city bus?

My mother popped me out of her, and then wants to talk to somebody else all the time. She spends all her time in another room, doing anything but spending time with me. So I make friends with my teddy bear. We do all sorts of adventures, but to be honest, it kind of scared the Living Hell out of me the other day when the teddy bear screamed at me when I wanted to eat out of the cat box.

And now all the teddy bear does is watch me. Seriously. It's like one of those pictures where the eye is following me.

Maybe it's an experiment. Let's see how many issues we can give a kid when that teddy bear gets up and starts chasing him, threatening to smack the hell out of him.

Although, on second thought, there are so many kids wandering around in our society today who need a whipping, I'd be willing to let childhood toys dole out the discipline. At least somebody would be doing it then. Seriously. I'd like a license to whup a few kids nowadays.

And just think. It was only a few years ago when a kid claiming "the teddy bear is watching me" was a red flag for a serious childhood psychosis. And now, it's just the most modern and advanced of child-rearing techniques.

I found the link at Fark. Which I love like the circus.