I’ve been exposed to a lot of kiddie shows on TV lately. Been watching them together with Regine. I’m not sure if Regine really likes them but like any contemporary parents out there, we routinely assume that she does. (but hell, she likes to watch ANYTHING colourful).

Watching these kiddie shows kinda made me realize, on what had I missed during my childhood. I never get to watch a lot of kiddie shows when I was a kid. The TV was never available to me as my mom would hog up the whole tube watching Hong Kong soap operas and western horror movies (golden age of the VHS and Atari) - way until I start schooling. I never get to learn about nursery rhymes. Mom never bought me any nursery books or taught me any of those children songs. Instead, I was fed with heaploads of Beatles, Bee Gees and some Freddie Aguilar shits. That’s why I grew up loving these old people.

(I can still remember… I actually bored to sleep in my Year 1 & 2 music classes. While my classmates would get delirious stomping their feet and flail their arms in unison like retards, I already knew how to sing the whole length of The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” and mimic that chicken head bob to that popular “Beat It” tune by Michael Jackson - I kid you not)

So when I finally get to watch these kiddie shows with Regine, I kinda realized how weird these kiddie shows are. Weird as in - not conforming to the laws of nature. Yes… I somehow think, the shows aren’t teaching our kids the right stuffs. Take for example, one of the shows has this couple of grown up hosts (one of them was a quasi-midget babe with this set of unusually large bosom) that teach kids how to sing. I know singing is generally ok, but these people are like OVERDOING it. The slightest thing that they happen to find interesting, they would go “Hey let’s sing a song about it!”. They see a cow? They’d sing about cows. They see a dog? They’d sing about dogs. Like, what the fuck man?? I suppose when we didn’t get enough annual increment, it is alright for us to jump up on the table and pull a head bang stunt bellowing heavy metal tunes to vent our anger? That’s just not right.

Then there were those fake animal icons. Bears that talk, for example. I mean… come on… we all know bears… they don’t talk. We’d be damned if they talk. Bears in fact, are extremely territorial and therefore are considered fucking dangerous. Even if they could talk, we should by all means stay away from bears. They’re wild animals and should be left alone. So why do we still give bears so much credit when they just don’t really care? Is our civilization so fucked up that we’re so ashamed to use our own kind to educate our kids? Things that I don’t understand.

I personally have seen a real example of these fake animal icons influencing the young in the wrong way. There was once my mom caught a rat in a cage. Determined to rid the vermin for good, she left the cage under the hot sun to give that animal an overdosage of sunburn. But my 5 year old cousin saw that cage and wanted to free that animal - insisting that the ‘mouse is harmless’ and ‘is friendly’. Being a very direct person, I broke the bad news to him “Kelvin, that thing is not a mouse. That’s a frigging rat. Rats have rabies and they’re mean animals.” Of course, he didn’t know what’s a rat. He only knew Mickey. But unfortunately, little Kelvin overlooked that the Mickey he saw wasn’t the same one that wears a cute red dungaree. Instead, that Mickey Rat had blotches of skin rashes on it and ranked like a clogged monsoon drain. Ugghh. (he finally left that vermin alone after couldn’t stand the hot sun)

So what’s the point really… when we can teach our kids the real stuffs, why do most of us still circumvent the facts of life with fictional characters and ideologies? I don’t know man, it seems like everyone’s doing it. Maybe it’s a trick to make the kids want to learn. But if it comes at the cost of obscuring some of the important truths for a much less important one, I’d rather teach her myself than letting that fake bear do it, right? At least daddy will tell her about how stupid it would be to think that bears could talk.

Come think of it, maybe I should write an early-learning education book for children… hmmm… for charity.

(lucky that my Regine couldn’t understand what the TV shows are about yet. When she begins to show signs of comprehending dialogs, I’m gonna switch her to Discovery channel to watch real bears)