SolarPlexus

Sometimes I cannot bear to watch the telly news. Last night it seemed to be full of dead and dying children: 3 month boy mauled by family dogs; Gazan father kisses dead baby goodbye; the Baby P case; Gazan orphan draw pictures of her dead family; and so it goes.

Then the good lady asked me to watch Hotel Rwanda, recorded off-air some time ago. I managed 30 minutes I think.

From the Precious Little Ones website…

The bibi® Swiss Strolli Rider is the most practical and fun, fun, fun item you can purchase for young children who wish to travel with a pushchair but not in it!

Correction: for young children who are lazy little bleeders.

I’ve never felt the need to storm away from my radio, for heaven’s sake, except for this morning. Nicky Campbell on Radio5Live had just started to cross-examine some blithering idiot representing a campaign against child poverty in the UK: Dare to Care. For once I was thankful for his ability to criticise Paxman-style, whereas normally I see this as a trait that makes complaints-where-none-exist for his TV vehicle, Watchdog. However, I saw red and had to scuttle away to my ablutions, treating the toilet cistern to a damn good thrashing whilst doing so.

Why? Because apparently the definition of child poverty in this country is the inability to attend a friend’s birthday party with a present.

The ‘logic’ behind this? Because as the world’s fifth largest economy our benchmark is higher.

Said blithering idiot tried to defend this position by saying that it was children who perceived poverty this way, and therefore as parents and adults we had to accept this, and more, we have to do something about it by raising awareness and supporting needy families. It was clear to me that this person had really rather cocked up by making this assertion, and at that point she wasn’t a particularly good evangelist for the campaign.

Any sane person could rebut with…

1. Children are not mature enough to correctly establish worth and value against a global scale. They may be intelligent enough to give the impression of grasping these issues, but need adult guidance to hone a system of values.
2. Children (and some adults, but that’s another bone of contention) will act like any selfish animal to obtain more of whatever they think they need. The adults’ task is to help them differentiate between ‘need’ and ‘want’.
3. Poverty is defined by the lack of the basics required for healthy human existence, and yes, this benchmark will change over time. 200 years ago we might have supposed the only prerequisites to be food, shelter and clothing. Nowadays we may sensibly add education, nurture and healthcare to that list.
4. Children may be victimised by their peers for not owning a mobile ‘phone, as I was victimised for not having Clark’s shoes or an Adidas sports bag. That does not mean that the victim is living in poverty. It simply means that the parents have exercised restraint against a coercive culture that seeks to make us all brand-ants. Or it simply means they’ve used their right to spend appropriately with limited resources.
5. Adults should be providing moral guidance, and helping children to arrive at a sensible value system - not the other way around! By all means listen to the views of children, but to recalibrate a poverty benchmark because of selfish, immature behaviour is clearly and demonstrably incorrect.

I could go on, but don’t feel I need to. Bottom line? This is just another example of the cart leading the horse: the problem is we have a culture that increasingly devalues basic, wholesome principles, and places undue importance on materialistic items of luxury. The answer is to educate, not shift the baseline.

I’m all for providing for the needs of children, and there are families in the UK that do need help for food, clothing, shelter and education - but if these things can be provided there should be no burden of responsibility to do more.

Just because I can’t afford to stump up £1000 for a school trip to the Italian Alps doesn’t mean our family is on the breadline. It means I’d rather put the money into a savings account to fund college education, or have to pay for a roof repair to keep us all warm.

I like taking photographs. Not in any kind of professional sense y’understand, but as I get older I’m finding it more important to document things as I go along and I can think of nothing more convenient than taking a few snaps.

These days a snapper has to be careful about shooting pics of people, especially of children. I never knowingly make strangers the subjects of my pics, and I am at least aware of the issues.

On holiday, whilst entertaining my three-year old son in Beveridge Park, Kirkcaldy, I spied a hamburger van with a horde of teenaged schoolkids around it. Their uniforms were all black. Next to this was a flock of white seagulls teeming over a bag of chips. The juxtaposition was startling. Since all of the kids had their backs to me I thought I’d take a distance shot of the scene as it was so interesting.

Imagine my dismay when two girls on a park bench starting calling me a “paedo” and shouting at the tops of their voices, laughing at the same time. I managed not to get too ruffled and stared at them for a moment or two, and subtly moved the aim of my camera - but notably didn’t stop taking pictures.

Fortunately for me they stopped shouting. Clearly in that situation discretion was the better part of valour. However, to appear ruffled in front of those peasants would’ve been just as bad.

As a father, and somewhat overly-sensitive, I have fretted about this incident. I know I shouldn’t feel personally insulted by the incident, but it still hurts to be smeared with something as abhorrent as paedohilia, even as a puerile joke.

Anecdotally, I heard of a professional photographer in Fife being reported for taking pictures of nude children on a beach. His argument was that he’d been taking pictures of this beach for years, wasn’t intentionally including the people on it, and it was the decision of the parents to let their kids cavort naked. We may accuse him of being a bit ignorant of the social climate but that’s all.

Needless to say, I have no pictures to show you of kids and seagulls so here’s one of sleeping ducks instead…

Today, the BBC reports on a call from teachers for Youtube to be shut down. The naïveté of such a request from a body that represents purportedly intelligent people staggers me.

The closure of a social networking site will not stop teacher/pupil bullying, though it will remove one outlet for it. So that’s good, the little sods will just resort to the old fallback of a turd through the letterbox. Let’s be clear: bullying is not on the increase because it has more outlets, it’s on the increase because of declining respect for authority, and a singular lack of discipline being applied to kids at an early age.

Youtube video bullying is the symptom, the disease is parental complacency.

It’s becoming typical of our society to call for symptomatic relief, rather than face up to the hard graft of long-term cures.

After scrambling around for some new viewing fodder for MiniDoc, I had a notion to drag out my Thunderbirds DVDs (the original Gerry Anderson series, not the flawed Hollywood remake). With a viewing time of just under an hour I reckoned this might try the attention span of a little person between the ages of 2 and 3! Perhaps Stingray? I always felt that this show was a tad boring compared to its stable mates. Joe90 then sprung into my sights. Quicker than I could ask, “Do you want to watch Joe90?”, MiniDoc had planted himself on the middle of the sofa and demanded that the Big Picture be switched on - the Big Picture is our toddler-friendly way of describing the modest video projector set-up we have.

To cut a long story short, MiniDoc relished the show, and asked for “one more” at the end. I was pleased with this result, and MiniDoc’s ability to remember key parts of the show - Joe plane, Joe’s daddy angry, Joe drive car, etc. etc. - proved that it had left an impression.

To discover more about Joe90 visit the BIGRAT website.

There are some questions to be asked before I wholeheartedly recommend Joe90 to the parentverse at large. Before screening I weighed up the effect of seeing a few explosions and gunshots would have on the littl’un - and reckoned the benefits of watching some classic TV fantasy would outweigh anything else. After all, watching this kind of stuff had never did me any harm ;)

However, while I maintain that Joe90 is a good option to introduce small kids to cult TV (there’s no blood, a lot of violence is implied, and any moral issues present are only discernible with an adult perspective), nevertheless I found myself analysing it through the lens of 21st Century political-correctness and then finding the programme wanting. I mean, what kind of modern show (whether for kids, teens or adults) would depict the nine-year old hero…

1. Calmly placing the lives of innocent civilians on a passenger plane in jeopardy by flying said plane at low level at a submarine gunboat?
2. Stealing a Soviet spyplane, and turning to destroy 3 chase planes with pilots, and an airbase with personnel, in order to get away scot-free? (Decades before Craig Thomas’s Firefox, but I digress).
3. Carrying a pistol in his schoolbag that can fire 200 rounds without reloading?

…not many. The creators of current telly would have to hold several moral debates each episode, and then have to rewrite the show. And yet, here we are - correctly concerned about children playing with toy guns - but forgetting that a lot of us are of the generation that ran around school playing “Japs and Commandos” and cutting down our classmates with imaginary sten guns.

Politically-incorrect telly may be a concern, but far, far worse is not providing a moral thermometer for your kids to measure what they are exposed to. Teaching our children that guns and junk food are bad lets them watch guns and junk food with that value in mind. Neglecting the lesson is surely the equivalent of placing them into a telly room from birth, with no further input from the outside world. You may as well chuck in a bottle of vodka and a packet of woodbines to boot.