Am I the only person in the world who feels kind of melancholic when I watch certain kids TV programmes?
My 3.5 year old watches a programme called Moon & Me, designed for bedtime. The premise is simple – a young child says good night to all the toys in her dolls’ house, and goes to bed. Little does she realise, her toys come to life at night time, and her toy Pepi Nana writes to the Moon Baby asking if he’d like a story. Then, they wake all of the toys in the house up and they all tell the most wonderful, surreal stories before going back to bed. Moon Baby then chimes on his special instrument (the magical Kalimba), gets into his space suit, and flies back to the moon.
A lot of parents complain about watching programmes with their kids – how Peppa Pig is about to drive them to commit murder. I understand – some programmes are absolutely unbearable and I am very guilty of vetting what my daughter watches so that I’m not pushed into that space (I learned the hard way not to allow a free for all on Netflix – she started watching an atrocious programme called Mini Force which seemed to completely sedate her brain and had ZERO education or meaning to it and was simply a time sink). It was entertainingly bad for one or two episodes, but the mum guilt soon took hold and I hated myself for allowing her wonderful brain to be dulled by such meaningless crap. I grew up with Thundercats, My Little Pony, The Legend of Prince Valiant – cartoons that had challenging questions about morality, lessons about tolerance, and occasional horror that scares me more today than it ever did when I was a young child.
Anyway, I’m always stunned by my response to certain things that she watches. The quiet, contemplative programmes have a strong effect on me. I find them comforting, and not at all silly. They are wonderful lessons in imaginative storytelling & the beauty of letting yourself wander in the realm of the fantastic for a while. There is something so soft about it all, so comforting, and peaceful. Amongst all of those feelings is a strange kind of sadness, perhaps a reflection of a childhood that I feel that I lost. An innocence and purity that I’m unsure I’ll ever be able to claim again now that I’m older, and fully aware of the less than ideal circumstances of my upbringing. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the joy of seeing my daughter lost in such wonderful imaginary worlds, claiming some of that precious, pure investment in the magic of the unreal that young minds seem able to embrace so wholeheartedly, without any of the cynicism that plagues us as we get older.
Maybe it’s just the joy of seeing my daughter lost in such wonderful imaginary worlds, claiming some of that precious, pure investment in the magic of the unreal that young minds seem able to embrace so wholeheartedly, without any of the cynicism that plagues us as we get older.
Whatever it is, it’s powerful. Wonderful. Are there any other parents out there who love to hunker down with their kids and lose themselves in an episode of Moon & Me, or take a trip to the Clangers Planet, holding back the tears as they share something otherworldly and magical with their bonkers preschooler?
As a side note and confession, I am guilty of actually enjoying Teletubbies. Well, I enjoy watching it with my daughter, because she gets SO MUCH JOY out of singing along to the opening and closing sequences! I sit there, conflicted, because I know that all of these programmes are manipulative, but equally, I wonder whether it’s worth worrying about– everything we consume is manipulative, right? Perhaps being manipulated by a programme where the sun is an actual baby is one of the better ways to let television get inside your head.
