In preparation for having a baby to take care of in nine(!) weeks Marianne and I have been talking with the midwife, signing up for classes,watching videos, reading books, surfing the web and, most importantly, watching morning kids shows to see what messages the media will eventually be attempting to indoctrinate our child with. Last week we watched Franklin the Turtle which I found to be extremely annoying and somewhat disturbing. Instead of being primarily concerned with entertaining, or educating, the show seemed designed as a pretense to reinforce positive messages such as 'lying is bad' or 'Mommy can love you and her new baby too'. What's wrong with a show having a positive message you may ask? Well nothing- Winnie the Pooh teaches children about the different ways people have of dealing with other people, tragic and difficult situations, etc...But when you read the House at Pooh corner you don't have the overwhelmingly feeling that there is ONE MESSAGE IN BIG HUGE CAPITAL LETTERS SUCH AS FRIENDS HELP EACH OTHER OUT THAT IS REINFORCED IN EVERY SINGLE SCENE. It's an insult to the intelligence of children to think that a story can't contain multiple,complex or even slightly ambivalent messages.And from a writing point of view it suprises me that no one seems to realize that a kid's show will just naturally work better if being entertaining is the first concern rather than the last. It may be unfair to compare a cartoon or kid's show that is pumped out on a weekly or daily basis with a work of genius like Pooh, and I would be very willing to let the whole issue go if I didn't think that the messages that were actually being promoted weren't so obviously wrong.
The MESSAGE that Franklin that sums up at the end of the episode is this: "Your friends will love you more if you tell the truth."
"Your friends will love you more if you tell them the truth" Jingled around in my brain for a few minutes after the episode ended and I had time to figure out what bothered me about it so much; In the Divided Self , R.D. Laing talks about how learning to successfully lie is a prerequisite for the healthy development of a self image for young children. No matter what you might think about Laing, this seems very
supportable to me; if you constantly reinforce to your child that you will know when they are lying to them or worse yet, that GOD always knows that they're lying they can begin to believe that their interior private world is transparent to anyone who cares to know about it. Your every thought would be visible to the whole world, and the chance thatyou might every really feel secure in the fact that you can have a special reserved place inside your head that no one else can have access to might be jeopardized. Children have to believe that lying is at least an option, although maybe not the best one. There may be situations where lying would be exactly the right thing to do, and teaching children that they should never lie is denying them a social tool that all adults resort to from time to time. To be fair, Franklin does goe through a series of gradually diminishing attempts to get round the truth before he finally concedes that he cannot, in fact, "eat 59 flies in the blink of an eye." and makes his revelatory pronouncement to his parents,"Your friends will love youmore if you tell them the truth." who smile self-congratulatory, glad that Franklin has finally realized what they've known since the first five minutes of the episode.
Again, I could let the whole thing go, if it wasn't for one little annoying word: More. As Stephen Merritt sings "No one loves for your honesty" If you've been having an affair with your best friend's wife, they are unlikely to love you more than they already do for telling them so. If you are lucky, they won't
love you any less.(Again, I'm not saying you shouldn't' tell them). More disturbing for me is the reverse logic that is possible with the statement that might even be damaging to the psyche of children: "Your friends will love you more if you tell the truth" logically implies the reverse. "Your friends will love you less if you lie." So, the message children are left to infer from this so called positive message
is that their parents are going to love them less for going through what is an absolutely necessary and normal stage of human development.
I'm prepared to concede that this bit of ugliness might be more the result of a lack of consideration by the writer or committee that created the episode, rather than a pre-mediated attempt to damage the psyche of growing children. But the very fact that I watched only on a small sampling of two different shows and they both demonstrated this same weird zeal to promote morality to their child audience demonstrates that this is indicative of the industry's confidence that this is how a
responsible piece of hack kids television should and must be. I think it's a safe bet that pseudo-positive messages are being espoused to our children multiple times per day. Scooby-Doo may not be particularly educational or enlightening , but it at least fits the 'entertainment' bill, and its complete lack of any form of moral proselytisation seems preferable to Franklin the Turtle.
