by Ian Haysom
Television is relentless: no time is allowed to ponder characters’ thoughts or recall their words because the images move too quickly. Books, meanwhile, encourage a critical reaction. The reader moves at his or her own pace, able to pause to ponder meaning.
Television deprives the child of their most important learning tool—questions. Children learn most by questioning. For the thirty-three hours a week the average kindergartner watches television, they can neither ask a question nor receive an answer.
Television desensitizes the child. Extensive research over the ten years prior to Trelease’s lecture had shown TV’s bombardment of violent images (eighteen thousand acts viewed between the ages of three and seventeen) makes the child insensitive to violence and its victims—most of whom the child believes die cleanly or crawl inconsequentially offstage. Yes, says Trelease, literature can also be violent. But one researcher showed you would have to read all thirty-seven of Shakespeare’s plays in order to experience the same number of acts of human violence (fifty-four) that you would see in just three evenings of prime-time TV.
Trelease’s message was to read to your kids. Spend time with them. Enjoy them.
The larger message, however, was for all of us. The less we watch others doing, the more we do ourselves, the more we think for ourselves, the better our world becomes.
The screen—every screen—is a great way to keep your child or grandchild amused. It’s also a good way for them to become desensitized, out of shape, lazy.
So go out and throw a ball with your granddaughter. Make some cookies with your grandson.
Or best of all, read them a bedtime story. You’re the best hope they have.
Playing Dress-up
When you get to my age and you have all the offspring I have, you have attended your fair share of school concerts, shows, and Christmas spectaculars. I think some kind of medal is in order.
My kids appeared in myriad shows. Amy was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Jani was Alice in Alice in Wonderland. Tim pretended to play trumpet in the school band (he hated the trumpet but wanted to go on a school trip, so mimed perfectly, and got to go. I give him marks for creativity, if not musicianship), and Paul has played a rose, Santa, and a news anchor, which is his current gig—he gets paid for that one.
And now it’s my turn to watch my grandkids. Mayana has sung and danced in many concerts and most recently acted in a school show in which she had to play a reporter. My buttons popped right there.
Recently, I was sitting in a gymnasium watching Emma as a rabbit. She was playing Cottontail in the kindergarten production of Peter Rabbit, and she was wearing cute ears and waving at us. She looked confident, eager, and happy.
This is a minor miracle. Emma, before she attended school, got terrible stage fright, even in the living room. Once, famously, she had a meltdown just before a kindergarten concert and refused to go on. Her parents—dressed in their finest and with cameras ready—spent the entire concert hugging their daughter backstage.
Emma developed amazing confidence and will now put on shows for the family, turning cartwheels and dancing around while younger brother Linden tries to keep up, usually falls over a lot, and then bows proudly at the end.
There is a system to the school concert. Kindergarten children are not there to do much except look cute. They wave at their parents, appear confused, generally ignore the teacher, wave some more, and then look around the hall in a glazed, absent-minded way, likely thinking, is my dad filming this and will he embarrass me in twenty-five years’ time by playing clips at my wedding so that everyone can laugh at me again? Will this hell never end? I know, I’ll wave some more. And scratch my bum.
Older kids have practised a song that they will sing out of tune, if they remember the words, and try to look as startled as possible, especially the boys who will not sing but stare defiantly ahead (except for little Johnny, who is teacher’s pet and always behaves impeccably).
Things improve but become a whole lot less cute as the kids get older. The parents are still besotted and watch only their child—even if their child is in the back row and hidden from view. Older children do not wave, but their parents do, much to their child’s embarrassment. So while their teacher is pleading with them to smile, they are instead lost in an embarrassed scowl. Thinking, will this hell never end?
Some concerts do last, well, forever as each class troops out to do its party piece. Sorry, I may be a little jaded. But, yes, they can be magical. Emma sang with her class at a school Remembrance Day concert recently, holding onto a small poppy. And she looked cherubic. And the song broke your heart. And there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
It’s strange, when you think about it—how we dress up our kids and grandkids and ask them to perform for us. Even if they don’t want to.
And while we’re on the subject of dressing up kids, when did young girls become such fashionistas? Not the boys. Linden is happy in anything and will wear his pyjamas all day if you let him. Sort of like his grandad then.
Mayana and Emma, however, have always been very conscious about what they wear. Mayana likes to wear cool ankle boots, Bolero-style hats, and smart jackets and sports a kind of Salt Spring chic, some second-hand, some new, and she always looks good.
Emma, meanwhile, wears waistcoats, vivid shirts, and special multi-coloured tights called Sweet Legs. I asked her why they were called Sweet Legs. She looked at me as though I was crazy. “Because they’re sweet, Grandad.”
Duh.
We have a dress-up box—an old trunk—and the kids spend hours digging in there. Linden will emerge with funny hats and clown masks, and Emma will find an old Halloween bear costume, or a leopard outfit, and she will wear it all day, and even to bed that night. And yes, little children still like to put on their parents’ high-heel shoes and clunk around, pretending to be grownups.
I think old-style grandparents used to worry and fuss about what their grandkids wore when they went out with them. Nowadays wearing a tutu on the high street is just fine. Boy or girl.
Emma’s latest thing is to wear ankle boots to the beach, which makes a change from sandals, I guess. Though she did invent the sand-sock, in which she wades into the ocean up to her ankles, then buries her feet in soft sand, which sticks to her ankles as she parades up and down in a kind of kiddie-catwalk.
I bought Emma and Mayana dresses when I was in Spain a couple of years ago. Mayana loved hers—a nautical design with red and blue horizontal stripes—while Emma seemed somewhat less enthusiastic. I asked her about it later.
“It was nice, Grandad,” she said carefully, trying not to hurt my feelings, “but I didn’t like that frilly bit around the hem. If the frilly bit had been higher, maybe, just under the waist, it would have been much better.”
Perhaps I looked crestfallen because she added, “I know, Grandad, we can cut the frilly bit off. Then it’ll be more grownup.”
Just like Emma.
13. New Normals
The phone buzzed. My wife picked it up, looked at the screen, and started squealing—with joy, as it turns out, though she had me worried.
“Emma, it’s fantastic! Look at you. Does it hurt?”
Mystified, I lean in and look at the screen, where Emma is on FaceTime showing she just lost a front tooth. It has been wiggling for weeks and it has finally come out. She looks like a hockey player.
A grandchild. A lost tooth. This is a big deal.
There is much discussion about tooth fairies and how much money they leave these days. Three dollars seems to be the going rate, though on our family WhatsApp site later that day my older kids say the most they ever got was twenty-five cents. One child says he found five dollars when his teeth came out when he was camping, but figures it dropped out of his dad’s pocket in the tent by mistake.
This is how many families communicate these days—virtually and immediately—and during the
early days of the COVID-19 crisis, it was the only way we could see our grandchildren up close and personal. On FaceTime, Skype, Google Hangouts, Zoom, WhatsApp, Facebook and myriad other platforms, including the good old telephone, we shared our experiences and our joys and fears and tears.
COVID-19 and early lockdowns around the world were a challenging time for everyone, but especially for older grandparents trapped in care homes where visits of any kind were banned. For us, it wasn’t so bad, even though, at first, we didn’t get to see our three grandkids at all because of social distancing.
Worse, we couldn’t help out with babysitting. My son-in-law worked from home with two young children bouncing around the house. He showed an amazing calm throughout. I remember working from home many years ago as a newspaper correspondent with four kids around, and it had many stressful moments. Once I was interviewing a former prime minister by phone when my then–six-year-old son Paul rushed into my office.
“Dad, I can’t find my socks.”
I put the phone down quietly, rushed out to his bedroom, and found two socks that almost matched and then rushed back to the phone to hear the prime minister complete a very long answer. I still wonder what I might have missed in those twenty seconds. A stunning national revelation, or confession, missed because of a pair of socks.
After the early days of COVID-19 lockdown, we began to edge ever closer to the grandchildren. We kayaked to a beach on Salt Spring and had a socially distanced picnic with Amy and Mayana.
And we had two picnics on quiet beaches nearer to home with our daughter and smaller grandkids. Emma and Linden were amazing, keeping a distance from us, never breaking the invisible barrier. They seemed to be better at it than their grandparents.
COVID-19 has recalibrated most of our lives for many years to come, but it also showed me the resilience of small children. They seemed to get on with their lives with a confidence and optimism and a collective shrug. So what? they seemed to say. We’ve got this. Sure, they missed school. They missed friends. But most of the kids I saw seemed to go about their lives as if everything would turn out fine tomorrow. And the next day.
Around them there were daily box scores of numbers of infected and dead, and they saw everything about them shut down, and they heard new expressions such as “flatten the curve” and “keep your distance.” But they were also told to wash their hands a lot, which was nothing new to a four-year-old.
We celebrated two family birthdays and Mother’s Day with multi-screen get-togethers in the early days of COVID-19, though I noticed all three grandkids got bored after a few minutes and went off screen to look for food or do somersaults or read a book or play with a toy. The virtual get-togethers were pretty successful. I also did a bunch of work meetings virtually—and that will likely be the new normal. I can’t believe I used to fly from Vancouver to Toronto, sometimes three times a month, to attend meetings. That now seems wrong on so many levels. It seems even the recent past is another country.
COVID-19 purportedly made most of us kinder, and I think that’s true. And more reflective. And it made us consider what’s important. While the world was on hold, we had a little more time to think, to consider who we are. There were many awful downsides to the world-wide pandemic, but many positives too.
The world certainly learned about the fragility and vulnerability of their parents and grandparents. We learned not to take older people for granted. I was moved when I watched a BBC documentary that profiled some older people who had died of COVID-19 in care homes. It showed that they were not old wrinklies, a stereotype of doddering inanity, but had been heroes and veterans and had done remarkable things They were musicians and teachers and Second World War prisoners, and suddenly they were real and not a statistic.
Our own children aren’t taking us so much for granted either. The joke, in the early days of the crisis, was that once we told our children not to stay out—and now they were telling us to stay home. Many people in their sixties said they had been hectored and lectured by their children and told to be careful. As my own son put it . . .
“We’d like you around a little longer, please.”
The world has been changed by COVID-19, and new normal is the new mantra. But the subtext is it will never be the old normal again. We are all of us—including our grandchildren—facing a different world than we had before. With luck it will be a simpler, kinder world. One our grandchildren will inhabit with relish.
We have all learned a lot. About the world and ourselves.
For one thing, we figured out that air-hugs and high-fives and blowing kisses from a distance can still work. Kinda. And my grandson also figured out that a garden hose can still hit his grandfather from a distance of more than two metres—and then saying, “Oops, sorry, Grandad, I made a mistake,” can still melt your heart, if accompanied by a cheeky grin.
14. Past, Present, and Future
One of my favourite quotes comes from twentieth-century British novelist L.P. Hartley:
The past is another country; they do things differently there.
That’s certainly true when it comes to today’s grandchildren. Our past is mostly a mystery to them, another time and place, another world. You mean they didn’t have smartphones, Grandad. No Netflix? How did you survive?
My past is still very much with me, and every now and then I remember a very happy time from my childhood. We can never quite escape who we were. Sometimes I’d like to go have a chat with my younger self and give him some sage advice. Don’t smoke. Try and stop dressing like a slob. Don’t watch so much schlock TV. And go and buy stock in something called Microsoft before anyone else does. In fact, go and make friends with a kid called Bill Gates. I probably wouldn’t listen to myself, or the smarter side of myself. Never did, likely never will.
We may look fondly at the past, to the fifties and sixties, but we gloss over the rampant racism, homophobia, discrimination, sexism, abuse, and cruelty that were also part of the fabric of the age. Sure, many of us had the summer of love, but we sure had many summers and winters of hate.
We look through the past with rose-tinted glasses. I loved my childhood, in a small town near the seaside in England. I loved being a kid. And a teenager. Playing and laughing and being part of a large loving family, even if my mother and her siblings sure seemed to fight a lot—or fall out, as they put it, which meant they stopped talking to one another for a time because someone looked at someone else funny, or said something, or didn’t say something. I could never quite keep up. They were from Yorkshire. Maybe it went, literally, with the territory.
I also loved TV comedy, everything from The Dick Van Dyke Show to a British sitcom called The Likely Lads. One of my two favourites were Doctor in the House and On the Buses. As a young reporter who enjoyed writing about entertainment, I interviewed many of the cast members of both shows.
Some years ago, a colleague at the TV station where I worked in Canada told me he had many of those old British sitcoms on video tape. Would I like to borrow them for a weekend? Would I!
My kids were then pretty young, but I knew they’d find them hilarious too, so I parked all the kids in front of the TV and put in the cassette tape. The first show was an episode of On the Buses.
“I was a bus conductor when I was a student,” I told them, “and some of the scenes were filmed at my old bus garage. And that woman there, Olive, I interviewed her too. She looks frumpy and boring, but she was actually quite glamorous and needed lots of makeup and . . .”
And I realized nobody was laughing. And I wasn’t laughing either. There wasn’t anything remotely funny happening and, worse, one of the characters seemed to be doing nothing but haranguing poor old Olive and calling her a daft old bat or an ugly old cow.
So we stopped watching that show and put on Doctor in the House. I had interviewed Barry Evans, the star. He was funny, cute, short, and adorable. My role model, though I never told my
kids that. I wanted them to see it for themselves.
But again, no laughter. I found myself cringing too.
“Maybe that was just a bad one,” I said, and put in another episode.
It was worse. We turned it off.
“Sorry kids,” I said. “It seemed funnier at the time.”
The fact is, much of comedy doesn’t age well. Look at The Honeymooners and Jackie Gleason threatening to send Audrey Meadows “to the moon.” It’s one of the most memorable TV lines of all time, but the idea of hitting your wife so hard she’d go into orbit doesn’t seem so funny anymore. Or ever.
We used to watch The Cosby Show with our kids. And now we want to erase that from our memories quickly. My kids won’t be showing their kids old tapes of that one, now that Cosby has been shown to be the opposite of the kindly father and grandfather we all thought he was.
Yes, the past is literally and metaphorically another country for me, as I’ve noted before. Very nice . . . but I don’t want to live there, not in the past. There is, as the old song goes, still a lot of living to do.
Okay, as the French kind of say, Past Imperfect, Present Tense, and Future Conditional. Let’s get to the present. To the now.
The Buddhists and those who practise mindfulness probably have it right when they urge us to live in the present. To be aware and in the moment rather than living in the past or worrying too much about the future. Which reminds me of another favourite quote, at Christmas:
“You can’t change the past. You can’t predict the future. And there are no presents.”
But as we become older, we do have a tendency to live in yesterday. Mostly because the music was better. And, perhaps, so were we.
We do have an urge to tell our grandchildren where we, and by extension, they came from. What our world was like. Even if, right now, as preteens, they don’t care.