Culture

Bad Cookie Monster!

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Is Sesame Street good for children?

A paper in Australia reports that DVDs of classic episodes of Sesame Street are being labeled “adult only” because they do not suit the needs of today’s preschool children. Cookie Monster is evil for devouring cookies and thus promoting bad habits that lead to obesity.

The needs of today’s preschool children???
The show met the needs of preschool children just as poorly during the original screenings: It promoted obesity by encouraging little kids to sit quietly in front of the tube and promoted mental anorexia by encouraging little kids to sit mentally passive in front of the boob tube.
In the linked article

Andrew Fuller, a clinical psychologist and consultant on children’s television production, said a sanitised world was far more dangerous than the whacky world of Sesame Street.
“Unless we expose kids to a diverse range of characters and behaviour they will not be prepared for the real world,” he said.

Before tube world kids gathered this experience in…the real world!

Via Karen DeCoster.

It Could Have Been My Mom

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But for the grace of fate this could have been my Mom:

City of Miami police charged Shenika Shanatle Vicks with one count of child neglect after police found the toddler walking barefoot about 8 a.m. Sunday.
…..
Police kept the toddler at police headquarters until Vicks, 27, reported her son missing about 1 p.m.

The difference, at least according to oft repeated stories at family gatherings, is that my Mom knew I was gone rather quickly and was out searching for /finding me in short order…15-30 minutes. None of this 5 hour crap for her.
The linked story doesn’t provide much detail. Maybe Vicks was out looking for him for five hours before reporting him missing. On the other hand maybe she didn’t know he was gone. The latter would be neglect!

Another difference was that back when I was a young’n we didn’t keep our doors locked. We didn’t keep kids under lock and key because of desperate fear of the world around us. Even so, 2 was a little young to be doing this much wandering but by the time 1st grade we were out learning about the world around us without having to deal with parental myopia.