What Our Toddlers Mean When They Scream Incomprehensibly
What does it mean to expect to be able to watch anything at any time? Probably it's fine, right?
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As I texted a friend recently, my favorite part of modern parenting is when your 3-year-old just keeps shouting “I want the ghost on terrilla!” over and over again and expects you to know what the fuck they’re talking about.
My child screamed this at me at least ten times the other morning, and it wasn’t until a few days later that my wife deduced that he’d been asking for a Spidey and His Amazing Friends episode entitled “Ghost in the Museum,” (season 3, episode 15). In this installment, Team Spidey must stop a spirit called “Cyrilla Calypso” (aka the ghost of Cyrilla…) from stealing artifacts from a museum. I don’t know exactly how the story plays out, but the theme song still slaps. That guy from Fall Out Boy will sing the hell out of absolutely anything.
I ended up being impressed with the accuracy of my son’s recall, even if that level of specific detail is basically impossible to parse when conveyed by a toddler. They will scream for anything. Good luck figuring it out.
Without going on too much about kids these days, or pretending that mine is the first generation who had to learn how to parent, it does seem like the specificity of things small children can demand at any given moment nowadays is unprecented in human history. I do remember once throwing an absolute terror of a tantrum about a Ronald McDonald wristwatch I saw on TV. Halfway through the absolute piss fit I was throwing, complete with tears and thrown clothes, I remember my mother producing from her purse, almost like magic, the exact watch I’d be screaming about, that up until that point I’d only seen through a screen — a hunk of chunky red rubber with a white watch face and picture of Ronald McDonald pointing at numbers. It was almost as if she’d predicted this precise tantrum all along and had merely been biding her time until it became necessary to reveal the item.
How did she do it? Was there such a short list of things a kid might scream about and demand to have in the mid-80s that a mom could accurate predict it or did she just know me that well? It impresses me even more now than it did then, and even then it impressed me so much that it’s one of my earliest memories (along with getting stung by a bee when I was playing in the geraniums when I was two). At least then, demanding to watch a specific show at a specific time was technologically impossible. Now kids can, and they know it. Sometimes my kid will bray satanically for some song that I didn’t know existed until that moment, and hopefully Siri will accurately locate it in time for me not to crash the car and kill us all. Hooray, technology! Incredible!
Even if you’re the kind of parent who tries your best not to just stick a screen in front of your kid whenever they get loud, the temptation to is there. It’s always there. The goblin-or-zombie dilemma. How weird should I feel about that? Should I be horrified when I hear my stepson screaming that the Indian food he had the other night was “bussin’” into his Fornite headset during his second hour of gameplay, and immediately confiscate his electronics? Or would that only make me exactly like the weird parents who banned their kids from watching The Simpsons when we were kids because Bart was such a bad influence? (I haven’t kept tabs, but I assume they all grew up to be weirdos).
As a parent you’re constantly being reminded of the limits of your own control. You can either panic about it and pretend you’re still the sole master of their destiny and then put them in home school or something, or you can come to accept that, short of extraordinary intervention (joining a cult, or moving them all to a Unabomber cabin in the woods somewhere, say), your kids are inevitably going to be a product of whatever society they’re born into, for better or worse (and probably worse). Is it worse for them to suck just as much as everyone else, or to be ostracized for being the only well-adjusted one in a crowd full of broccoli-headed zombies saying “bet” to each other during a videogame?
Something to ponder. I still haven’t quite worked it out for myself, but I’ll keep you posted.
Tales From My Browser Tabs
Paul Shrader Walked Out of Joker: Folie á Dieux
Paul Shrader’s recent movies (First Reformed, The Card Counter, Master Gardener) are too visually off-putting for me to fully enjoy, but he’s fast becoming my favorite film critic. As he told Interview magazine about Joker 2 recently:
“I saw about 10 or 15 minutes of it. I left, bought something, came back, saw another 10 minutes. That was enough.” … “It’s a really bad musical. I don’t like either of those people. I don’t like them as actors. I don’t like them as characters. I don’t like the whole thing. I mean, those are people who, if they came to your house, you’d slip out the back door.”