Just a little (link) love: Baryshnikat edition
November 8, 2018
Mushing through a 7.1 earthquake.
The Wellington Zoo welcomed an extra large litter of Capybara pups on October 25. AND THEY ALL HAVE THE SAME EXPRESSION.
A doctor on his suicide attempt 30 years ago, read Comment 30. (I didn’t read any of the others)
Tame The Beast Or Be Tamed: A musher story that made me feel bad for laughing.
Did you know about Paw Patrol’s dominating popularity? I had just seen some of their co-branded things like Band-Aids but knew nothing about them despite having a preschooler. All the kids are into PJ Masks (absolutely terrible stories in the books we checked out), Peppa Pig, and one other color coordinated set of kiddie superheroes but I don’t know their names.
So many cephalopods – gorgeous!
Angela’s report from the first annual Cents Positive retreat! It sounds like it was awesome.
Baryshnikat!
I hate that Paw Patrol still has the old “one female main character, 3 or more male main characters” models that is so prevalent. Usually Nickelodeon is better about that, but not this time. It looks like they added 1 female character and 3 male characters to the line-up that was around when my kids were the right age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAW_Patrol#Original_members
(DC2 is currently into the Boss Baby series on Netflix and old episodes of Garfield and friends which has exactly 1 (impolite and angry) female character in the entire thing, not counting occasional Liz the vet cameos. There are no women in the Garfield universe. We need to do better…)
Aw that’s a dang shame.
Sure missed you at Cents Positive! And somehow the kiddo is not obsessed with Paw Patrol like most, though he’s not opposed. I wonder if part of that is because he doesn’t see commercials pretty much ever? Though he does think Daniel Tiger is pretty great.
Does he watch the show? I’ve been curious about what it is because frankly anything with dogs in it is up my alley but not enough to watch it. Or risk JB getting hooked!
Daniel Tiger IS pretty great. He has good taste 🙂
My daughter (2.75) has yet to be exposed to Paw Patrol, and I’m hoping to evade it for as long as possible. She can identify Minnie Mouse on sight, I think because one of her daycare classmates has a bunch of MM clothes, but– I’m really trying to limit how much commercial culture she even knows exists. And I think that the tone of that particular article really hits on why. There’s a paragraph in there that reads:
“Those kids include Justin Feist, age 2, of Rockville, Maryland. “He’s a Paw Patrol fanatic,” said Justin’s mother, Shalahea Reed, who spends up to $80 every other week on Paw Patrol clothes, toys and downloading new episodes. In February, she plans to take her son to a live Paw Patrol stage show in Virginia. “Everything that comes out of his mouth is Paw Patrol,” she said.”
I don’t want my kid to be a commercial target in that way, and I don’t want the people behind her entertainments to regard their work as a revenue stream first. I want her entertainments to be things that are better for her– things where she’s sparking creativity via active play or things where whatever it is is teaching her something valuable. The alphabet, reading, numbers, behavior/empathy, things like that.
I know that there will come a day in which she’ll get enamored with something that’s part of popular kid culture and I’m going to have no control over whether or not that thing has any redeeming features. But I can work towards her not being exposed for as long as I can manage. And I can’t regard it as at all lamentable if nothing is ever as big as Paw Patrol again.
Oh my goodness, yes, but I think the parents play a HUGE role in how obsessed the kids are. We let JB watch some shows and ze very clearly enjoys them but we don’t go buying all the merchandise and so on. It’s just a show, it doesn’t need to become a lifestyle. We have plenty of other toys and books to enjoy in addition to whatever is currently popular and we don’t have any philosophical problem to saying no to merchandise.
Our approach now that ze is coming on four is a little less like yours (which was ours before). We want zir to enjoy things, current or classic, and to have little fandoms, it can be very fun! But it will give us a chance while ze is young to shape how ze approaches those fandoms – more healthily than kids who do it as young teens wildly and without any checks or controls – so that ze doesn’t get completely immersed and obsessed.
That story by Professor Steve Robson and the #30 comment that followed was so hard to read. That young girl saved his life and yet she never told him that she knew what he was trying to do or why she was there. Just imagine that scenario playing out and the fear that he might try again at a later point in time. That the “code of silence” kept her from talking to him about his troubles and worries and that he was unable to seek help because he feared for his future in medicine. I applaud his story and the woman who commented. We need to reach out our hands to help others when they need it and we need to break down the barriers that force people to stay silent.
It was! I felt so bad for all of them, and hope that they’ve and their readers have learned something valuable to help other people in the future.