Having nothing to do with a house, or moving, or London

While I really do love the connectedness that those of us fortunate enough to have been born into the 'Net generation enjoy, one of its downsides is that there's so much crap online that it's sometimes hard to find useful or interesting or even partially accurate information. (Another downside is the amount of time one can waste reading and writing blogs like we're doing right now).

I am fortunate to have a wireless broadband card for my laptop and at least 6 hours on a train a few times a week during my frequent treks to New York (I'm employing a fairly loose definition of 'fortunate' here), so I have a LOT of time to surf the web for items of varying degrees of newsworthyness. One of the tools I use to do this is Digg (www.digg.com), which allows users to mark an article as interesting. The more users who flag something as interesting, the higher its ranking, and therefore the higher its likelihood of falling directly into the laps of lazy badgers like me.

Today, I happened upon a story (http://oneofthosehorriblemoms.blogspot.com/2007/03/fake-out.html) about a 6 year old girl who was really badly treated by the American Girl Place in Manhattan when she brought her favorite (non-AG) doll in for a makeover. Now, normally, I'm pretty skeptical of such stories, as they tend to a) be untrue and b) take on a life of their own. But reading some of the other posts on the blog leads me to believe that this woman has nothing to gain by making this up.

And sadly, I can see it happening. The staunch refusal of service by the sales clerk. The snide comments (directed at a CHILD) by the overpriveleged lookers-on. The vilification of a little girl, whose only offense, as far as I can see, is that she didn't own the right brand of toy.

And we've no one to blame but ourselves. If you consider how our society incents us to put our children's every whim at the very top of our list of priorities, it's little wonder that so many of our children are narcissistic and lazy. Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that our children shouldn't be high on our list of priorities, but come ON. Let's distinguish 'needs' from 'wants' here.

Take birthday parties for example. Does a kid really NEED $4500 worth of balloons? (http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/CollegeAndFamily/RaiseKids/KidsPartiesatSpareNoExpensePrices.aspx). A number of years ago, I was a waiter at a very nice restaurant in the Poconos (yes, there were one or two in those days). I had to dress as a jester. For a birthday party. For a TWO YEAR OLD! The kid spent the whole time filling his diaper and throwing cake at the walls, do you think he cared that Little Bo Peep and Cinderella were serving his cannon fodder to him?

Fortunately, some parents are recognizing the sheer ridiculousness of this trend and have started hosting more modest affairs, which the kids seem to enjoy just as much as the 'my party's bigger than yours' flauntfests. One of our neighbors had the children play simple games like 'make-a-mummy', in which the kids wrapped each other up in crepe paper. It was great fun, and the kids loved it. Plus the adults got some good party time while the kids tried to get out of their wrappings. Maybe next year we'll use duct tape.

Even more than when I was a kid, today's toys seem to create a culture of inclusion (or one of exclusion, depending on whether you have it). A friend's daughter recently showed me how her new PlayStation Portable interacted with other nearby PSPs. You can play games, of course, but you can also send instant messages. No more passing notes in class, I guess. Yeah, it's cool technology, but I can't help thinking that it wasn't so much the coolness or usefulness of the technology that drove Sony and others to build these things as it was the wheels of commerce. If you're a kid and your friends all have PSPs and you don't, not only are you on the outside because you don't have the cool new thing, but you're also physically excluded from the ad hoc network of your friends, who are all chatting away merrily without you.

I suppose that the opposite could be argued - that the PSP encourages connectivity between people who might not interact socially under other circumstances. I'm no sociologist, but I suspect that if these things do have some social bridging effect, it only lasts as long as the batteries. I might carry on an IM conversation with someone because it's fun to do so, but if I don't like that person in real life (or in 'meatspace' as I believe it's now called), I won't associate with them.

Call me wildly nostalgic, but I miss the days of wooden Fisher Price toys and metal Tonka trucks. When we played outside without fear of being kidnapped or shot or exposed to peanuts. When kids didn't have cell phones or battery powered Hummers. When going out for a treat didn't involve dropping by the mall for a shopping spree at Abercrombie. Our wants were many to be sure, but our needs were simpler, and, I think, we're better able to cope with the disappointment of not having our wants met.

But on the other hand, we DID have to wear plaid pants and velour shirts, so maybe it's really a wash.