Ay-yi-yi!

I was watching YouTube tonight and playing a free online version of Bejeweled. (Don't laugh. I used to stay up til all hours reading really smart articles, whose arguments I have mostly forgotten.) Because it was a free game, I had to put up with advertisements. What was being advertised, you ask? Fish sticks, oddly enough. A blonde girl, maybe four years old, accosts her mother with a generic box of minced, minced fish sticks and demands, in sarcastic disbelief, "Have you ever seen a minced fish?" Does the mother inform her that she can keep a civil tongue in her head? Does the mother suggest that the child make a polite request regarding the fish sticks rather than this snotty rhetorical questioning? Or inform the child that her options are to eat what's been made or help herself to bread and butter? Apparently not. In the next scene, we see Mommy dearest placing before the tow-headed angel a plate of Van deKamp's fish sticks. Does the little girl thank her mother for preparing such a delicious treat? No. She looks up and says, "That's more like it."

I'm not worrying about the fact that a snotty child is being used to advertise something. But I am amazed that the snotty child would be used to market a product which, presumably adults are purchasing. Have we accepted that children have a right to be snotty and ungrateful? And that those characteristics, instead of being as firmly discouraged as possible, should instead be catered to? That our shopping lists should revolve around our children's pickiness?

No wonder I'm having such trouble with Lev. I haven't yet signed on to the brave new world of parenting. I'm one of those deluded, fuddy-duddy parents who think that the littlest inmates should not be in charge of the asylum.

Comments

Mrs. Bear said…
Oh my goodness, I was just thinking about this commercial the other day!
March 1, 2010 at 7:49 PM
LysistratasDaughter said…
So I'm not the only one who's seen this?

*********************

Okay, I have to give credit to Christie Mellor of the hilarious "Three Martini Playdate" books for the bit about the littlest inmates taking over the asylum.

Phew. The former academic in me can now stop its anxiety attack about possible plagiarism issues.
March 1, 2010 at 8:11 PM
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