Jack

He's all my exercise, my mirth, my matter;
Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy;
My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all.
He makes a July's day short as December,
And with his varying childness cures in me
Thoughts that would thick my blood.

--William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale

MTV's 16 and Pregnant

According to MSN News, MTV is making a reality show called 16 and Pregnant. The programme was apparently inspired by the popularity of Juno (a film I hated) and will feature pregnant teenagers whose experiences are documented on camera and aired on MTV.

As any mother who takes her job seriously will explain, getting and being pregnant are the easiest parts of being a mom. The real challenges (and rewards) come afterward, along with late-night feedings, diaper changes, fevers, diarrhoea, trips to the emergency room, headaches, tears, frustration, a thousand tiny betrayals and reconciliations, frequent disagreements with one's partner (if he's around), disruption, improvisation, constant second-guessing, and, most of all, an often crushing and nearly overwhelming sense of total responsibility for the life of another human being.

A better idea for a show would be to send cameras to document the lives of 19 year old single parents of toddlers, who work all day at dead end service sector jobs while mouth-breathing daycare staff raise their kids for them, or their conversations with patronizing social workers who don't have an iota of genuine feeling for these women or their children. Maybe the show could also interview young fathers who have abandoned their kids and ask them how it feels to know that their children will grow up wondering why their fathers didn't love them, or that they are unlikely to ever meet their grandchildren, who also stand a decent chance of growing up fatherless.

Of course, MTV would never encourage today's teens, pregnant or otherwise, to grow up and take life seriously. Teenagers and childish twentysomethings can be persuaded to buy all kinds of crap they don't need, while hard-nosed adults who actually have to think about where their money goes probably give far less of it to the vacuous, opportunistic fashion peddlers at MTV.

I wonder if we'll see 16 year old girls getting pregnant in order to have a shot at making it onto national television. Let's hope today's young women are smarter than that.

(Image from Jupiter Images)

Juno Was a Lousy Movie

SOAPBOX ALERT: I usually try to avoid both preaching and critiquing movies at TPM, but sometimes a guy's just gotta harangue. So here I go:

Juno is only barely a movie about bringing new life into the world. It's primarily a postmodern moral experiment to see if ironic, near-weightless characters can have their cake and eat it too. To achieve this, it has to abandon the traditional stuff of reproductive drama, like territoriality, responsibility, and the powerful, conflicting bonds that exist between lovers, parents and offspring, in favour of an idealized grrl-topia where men behave like passive, indulgent milquetoasts or sexual predators, and mothers-to-be are somehow empowered by acting like selfish, irresponsible babies themselves.

The infant that arrives at the film's end is passed off to Garner's character with hardly a tear (says Juno in the voiceover: "She was never really ours, anyway"), and comes off more like an afterthought or prop than an actual human being. This child is inexplicably delivered from a promising domestic situation in which both parents are present (and in love!) along with three biological grandparents and a committed step-spouse, and into the hands of a single mother who has demonstrably poor taste in men--the equivalent of this in poker would be to throw out an entire royal flush for a queen and a joker. No one with any real-life childbearing experience could write a movie in which allegedly sane people think and act this way.

Juno tacitly encourages young women to think that pregnancy is all about them. It isn't. Juno also falsely suggests that giving up a baby after carrying it around for 9 months isn't much harder than getting one's appendix out. Whether one is pro-choice or pro-life is irrelevant--everyone should be pro-responsibility and pro-reality, and Juno is neither. It is a travesty, a celebration of narcissism and immaturity, and it's sad that real teenagers who don't know any better are going to take cues from this ridiculous film.

Blinkered selfishness and intelligent self-interest are not the same thing at all. The sooner more feminist-influenced artists figure this out, the sooner they'll stop making shitty movies like Juno.

(Image from www.dorkgasm.com)

Naked Baby with Book

Two things you can say about my family: we love to get naked and we love to read. In this instance, Jack climbed up into the orange easy chair, peed on it, and then sat down in the puddle to read Robert Munsch's wonderful Love You Forever (we don't normally let our son wallow in his own urine, but somehow it just happened). This picture now resides in a special file titled Pics to Show the Prom Date.

Baby Einstein, Hack Journalism

There's a short, terrible article by Alice Park in Time magazine this month. I will quote it here in full:

"How Not to Raise a Genius: Is Baby Einstein doing your child more harm than good?

"There are no shortcuts when it comes to learning, and that applies to becoming a prodigy as well. Popular videos such as the Baby Einstein and Brainy Baby series have attracted millions of parents eager to give their babies an intellectual leg up. But a recent study shows that these products might be doing more harm than good. Experts at the University of Washington reported early in August that for every hour each day that infants watched the kaleidoscope of changing images and music on these DVDs, they understood an average of seven fewer words than babies who did not use such products. 'The assumption is that stimulation is good, so more is better,' says Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician and co-author of the study. 'But all the research to date shows that there is no such benefit.'

"That's hardly reassuring to parents who last year spent 200 million on the Baby Einstein series. They might consider instead the advice of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommends that infants under 2 not watch anything on a screen and instead just interact with parents."

If Alice Park had actually read the study mentioned in her article, instead of skipping right to the University of Washington's press release on it, she would understand that it did not specifically evaluate any Baby Einstein products at all. The authors of the study asked questions pertaining to the general category of "baby videos," rather than Baby Einstein in particular. Regardless of whether Park did not read the study or she simply did not understand it, this is still piss-poor journalism. I've come to expect nothing less from Time, which has disappointed me with every issue I've picked up in the last several months.

Additionally, there are a few other problems with the article worth pointing out. The pompously phrased idea that "there are no shortcuts when it comes to learning" is basically incoherent. It's not even possible to conceive of a "shortcut to learning" that would not itself warrant the description of "learning," albeit of a more efficient kind. Consider, for example, a sci-fi scenario in which babies have USB ports installed in their skulls allowing Disney to simply jack information directly into their brains via a neural-cybernetic interface. It's hard to imagine a shorter "shortcut" than this, but if the information were absent at first and then present afterward, the act by which the brain acquired it would still be called "learning."

My family owns one Baby Einstein video. I have watched My First Signs: See and Sign with Baby from beginning to end with my son, Jack, several times. Park's description of the video as a "kaleidoscope of changing images and music" hardly does it justice, except insofar as this might apply to any commonplace multimedia presentation (as seen, perhaps, by a time-travelling visitor from the 18th century). This mischaracterization further reveals the lack of care and attention with which the author has reviewed her source material.

A co-author of the study, Dr. Dimitri Christakis, is quoted as saying, "The assumption is that stimulation is good, so more is better." To whom does this assumption belong? To Disney? To parents? To the researchers who designed the study? It is not clear whether Christakis or Park gets credit for the irresponsible ambiguity of this statement, but when it is combined with the article's murky, unqualified use of data and the idea of a "kaleidscope of changing images" the impression made on the reader is like something out of A Clockwork Orange--a harrowing, psychedelic experience so unwholesome that it actually causes children to unlearn language at the rate of 1 word every 8.5 minutes.

Alice Park and Dr. Dimitri Christakis are right to claim that children are better off being spoken and read to by attentive mothers and fathers rather than plunked in front of the television set all day. To any thoughtful parent, this information should be self-evident and accessible by plain common sense. People who require an opportunistic, manipulative and ill-informed magazine article to convince them of its validity should probably think twice about having babies in the first place before they start worrying about raising geniuses.

I don't particularly care for the garish theme parks and neutered fairy tales of the Walt Disney corporation, but I have even less time for bad writing and bad thinking. I don't think Baby Einstein is going to raise our son in lieu of his mother and me--it's basically Sesame Street with classical music. Speaking more generally, I don't think watching a "baby video" once in a while is going to hurt him, either.

I would be more concerned if he wanted to start reading recent issues of Time magazine.

My Kids

Caitlin, the know-it-all; Chloe, the hedonist; Jack, the baby.

Piano Lesson

Baby Teeth

Legend has it that the Vikings made jewellery out of their children's baby teeth. This was supposed to bring luck and power in battle. In Europe, hundreds of years ago, it was customary to bury one's children's baby teeth in the ground. The idea was that if a witch got her hands on the child's teeth, she could lay a curse on him or her. I'm not too worried about witches cursing my son, although his mother and I must occasionally fight the temptation to curse at him.

Today Robyn discovered the tiny protruding tips of Baby Jack's first two teeth. They are both central incisors in the bottom row. This makes me a little sad. Kids grow up too fast, and I will miss his gummy grin. Still, the sooner he gets teeth, the sooner they will fall out, and the sooner I can start constructing a necklace to increase my supernatural power.