Limiting Children is Childish

Adora Svitak, only twelve years old, has already lectured to children and adults across the United States and the United Kingdom promoting literacy and sharing her love of writing. Most recently she was invited to be the youngest speaker ever at the February TED Conference, a week-long conference with top intellects from around the world who lecture on “ideas worth spreading.” After becoming recognized as a “child” prodigy from her essays, poems, and blogs at the age of 6, she was first denied a publishing deal with one major children’s publisher who said they “don’t work well with kids.” Frankly, this kind of behavior is more childish than her.

Often when children are called childish, it’s because of some kind of irrational demands or irresponsible behavior that does not line up with the rules and expectations set out by adults. But it is important to remember that things like temper tantrums are just as irrational as 7-year-old Charlie Simpson thinking he could raise £500 for Haiti earthquake relief by cycling 5 miles around South Park, London. And indeed £500 was irrational, considering he ended up raising over £200,000, or over $300,000. The difference between this and a temper tantrum however, is the potential value of the irrational behavior – a temper tantrum is very egocentric, with aims at obtaining immediate personal benefits (i.e. ice cream or an extra hour of television). But the potential value of the seemingly absurd dream to raise money by riding your bike is obviously beneficial to a large population of people. Childish should not be associated with creativity that boarders irrationality, but with the egocentrism in Jean Piaget’s 2nd of 4 stages of child development that is outgrown by age 7.

Although sometimes it seems this stage 2 egocentrism is never outgrown – imperialism or world wars could be called just as irrational and selfish as a nation-scale temper tantrum. But we can already look back at some events like this throughout history as childish because we have progressed. And as many of us have read on inspirational posters in school classrooms, the children of today are the leaders of tomorrow. The whole reason we’ve progressed beyond cavemen or the dark ages is because each generation improves upon the one before it. That is because kids still dream big, and as Adora says, “in order to make anything a reality, you have to dream about it first.”

A simple example she uses, is the Museum of Glass in her home of Tacoma, Washington. Here, glass blowers invite children to draw and design some pieces they will make, which are often much more imaginative and creative because they aren’t limited by the knowledge of what’s easy or hard to shape. In a larger sense, children aren’t burdened with as much knowledge of past failures, limitations, or road blocks in order to make their dreams a reality – their imagination often pushes the boundaries of possibility. They are fortunate to come into the world a blank slate of personal experience but with the knowledge of past failures to guide their thinking.

When children are called childish, or discouraged from dreams adults consider irrational, we are lowering our expectations for them to the level of our own past accomplishments. We should not be trying to turn kids into our kind of adult, we should provide them with opportunities to lead and succeed so they can be better adults than their parents. Age discrimination is self-defeating to our future. We cannot call Adora or Charlie childish for dreaming big because the brilliant ideas that will benefit our world in the future lie in the dreams of children today. We need more child-involved programs like GreenMyParents to continue to foster children’s imaginations and confidence so that their dreams can become a reality.

Cars 2: Parking In Walmart After A Race Through Theaters

DreamWorks Animation’s last week release of How To Train Your Dragon included the deployment of Viking ships full of Dragon merchandise in over 2500 WalMarts worldwide and Happy Meal toys at McDonalds. As part of promotions leading up to its release, DWA and Paramount also negotiated a first of its kind partnership with The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America to create a special Dragon Training badge (which of course required scouts to watch an advanced screening so they could name and identify at least three dragons from the film). This isn’t the first and surely won’t be the last time that major retailers, manufacturers, and production companies team together to squeeze as much money out of a single idea as they can.

But at least DreamWorks Animation has produced a non-sequel film, which is rare in these days, that has also brought technological innovations and much positive critical attention. However, when the attractive potential of auxiliary markets out-performs the desire to retain artistic integrity, we’ll continue to see films like Cars 2 released solely for consumers to drive their way to WalMart instead of parking themselves in the movie theater.

Pixar has established itself as an animation company that releases only one feature film a year, that is a compelling, original story, which has earned them an astounding 24 Academy Awards from only ten films. And of all their critically acclaimed successes, Cars, the only film to receive less than a 90% rating on RottenTomatoes with a C-rating of 75%, will extend its franchise with a sequel in the summer of 2011. Worse yet, this film was also their poorest performance in the box office in over ten years, leading many movie fans to wonder what the motivation behind the production really is, and what happened to Pixar's originality?

Follwing the Cars release in June of 2006, Disney Consumer Products reported that “Cars is recording 10 to 1 more retail volume than Finding Nemo at the same point in its release.” In fourth quarter reports later that year, Disney’s chief executive Robert Iger promised investors “we expect to see a holiday boost for Cars merchandise, which has been one of our biggest lines of the year, with retail sales around $1 billion." In an interview last year once Cars 2 had been announced, Iger explained that he conceived of the sequel while still promoting the original film on a worldwide tour – this, coincidentally, was when those first reports of '10 to 1 retail volume' were coming in.

It’s strictly business when a production company signs licensing and merchandising deals to get more promotion and marketing, or even to make more money from auxiliary markets, but it’s downright lazy and manipulative when they depend on these contracts instead of retaining their own artistic integrity. The kind of integrity that would prevent them from making a sequel to a film where three actors for five of the characters’ voices have all died - the writer of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, Joe Ranfit, and legendary performers Paul Newman and George Carlin. Whether they're re-cast or written-out, don't worry too much over this slap in the face to real artists, because Larry The Cable Guy is still around to reprise his role.

Coming to theaters near you next summer, your kids’ favorite car toy Lightning McQueen will venture outside the country for the first time. This international racing adventure, that has already encountered lots of story problems and re-writes, will lead him to encounter a vast array of new cars whose limited edition toys will also soon be available for purchase. Also next summer, look for films based off the board game Battleship and the ViewMaster toy. And summer of 2012, in Pixar’s third consecutive year releasing a summer sequel, look for Monsters Inc. 2 along with Stretch Armstrong and Legos movies.