27 Feb The Battle Of The Box
Joseph Kelly’s cunning plan to outsource the breaking of his daughter’s television habit backfires.
It’s amazing how quickly rituals develop with kids. With my eldest daughter, Maisie, we have the breakfast ritual (Mum gives cuddles, Dad makes food), the bath-time ritual (Maisie and baby Frances sit in bath, Maisie pours bucket of water over Frances, Frances cries) and the bedtime ritual (Mum/Dad reads three books to Maisie in bed, Maisie cries for half an hour, claims to be hungry, claims to need to go to the toilet, demands more books, Mum/Dad reads three books to Maisie in bed…).
Recently another ritual was added to the list: the where-the-hell-is-ABC-Kids ritual. It begins on Saturday mornings just after breakfast when, to her horror, Maisie discovers that Rage has replaced The Wiggles with Wolfmother. This is the catalyst for a mad scramble through our ever-expanding catalogue of DVDs to find one that will erase the recently glimpsed image of Snoop Dogg and friends in a bath of jelly. Finally, after screaming at the DVD player to hurry up, Maisie settles into a Wiggles-induced state of calm.
After a few weeks of this, I began to think that a little distance between Maisie and the TV wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
After a two-and-a-half-hour drive, during which Maisie needed a record seven rest stops, we finally arrived at my mum’s place. Not only does my mum live on a farm packed with enough distractions to keep a toddler occupied for a week, but her TV is the type that takes about half an hour to warm up and makes a brain-piercing whine whenever the volume is turned up. If Maisie wanted to watch TV there, she would have to fully commit to the exercise. And while it has always amazed me that Maisie can’t count past 18 but can independently operate the TV, video, DVD player, pay TV and digital-TV receiver, I was confident that not even she would be able to make Mum’s TV produce a picture worth watching.
Smug in the assured success of my plan, I dropped Maisie at Mum’s front door and drove back home, leaving my daughter to break her TV habit cold turkey over the weekend.
On the drive home I thought about my own relationship with Mistress TV. Back when I was a kid, Mum would chase me and my brothers and sisters out of the house, telling us that the day was too beautiful to waste indoors. I spent most of my childhood cruising the streets on my three-speed chopper or playing cricket in the street with my brothers.
In summer, we would jump the back fence and lounge in our neighbours’ pool or play in the irrigation channels that ran past the grapevines. Some evenings after dinner, we were allowed into Mum and Dad’s room to squeeze onto their bed. The TV would then be rolled out of its hiding place and turned on for an hour.
On other evenings we would each do our own thing, or sometimes play a board game. I remember one particularly ‘Von Trapp’ night when Mum made a bunch of puppets and we put on a puppet show. Another time I organised a family disco, where I prepared diced carrots and water for everyone and turned the light on and off in time to the radio. (About 10 years later, when I moved out of home, I moved in with a bunch of students who shunned TV in the same way they shunned soap. Oddly enough, we held quite a few late-night parties where I’d dice up carrots and flick the light on and off in time to the radio.)
Obviously, if anyone could help break Maisie’s TV habit, it would be my mum.
On the Sunday drive back to Mum’s place I was pretty excited about the way the dynamics of our household were about to change. Frances would have to learn to walk before backyard cricket would become a staple daytime activity, but now that my mum had set Maisie’s imagination free, anything would be possible.
I was welcomed by Mum at the front door, and made my way to the lounge room. After seeing my little angel asleep on the couch, I had just one burning question for my mum: where the hell had the wide-screen TV and the DVD player come from?
It appears that while my response to my child’s TV addiction was to make it my mum’s problem to wean her off it, my brother’s response was to ensure that his kids had ready access to a fully operable TV at all times. The TV and DVD player had been Mum’s ‘gifts’ for hosting my brother and his family a month earlier.
“We’ve had so much fun,” said Mum. “We’ve watched The Sound of Music, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Fiddler on the Roof…”
Which leads me to our latest ritual: Maisie hops in the car for long car trip, Maisie demands soundtrack to 1970s musical feature, Dad requires numerous rest breaks…
