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On Children, Courage, and Cartoons
Winters in Corpus Christi, Texas were never very wintery. But on New Years Eve of 1975, it was a bitterly cold night. I remember that night because it was the night that the house across the street from us burned to the ground. I can recall my mother making trays of hot chocolate to take to the frozen fire fighters who were trying to contain the blaze.
Our house was crowded that night with a group of friends from our church who had come for an all-night party. Shortly after midnight, someone noticed flames rising from the roof of the house across the street. My friend, Mike, promptly jogged across the street and broke through the front door, running around the smoke-filled house with a cloth over his mouth to make sure no one was at home. (Mike was a blue chip Texas high school linebacker in those days, and running through solid objects was something he had worked up into a kind of expertise.)
I thought about that night again recently after my son pointed me to this interesting article commenting on the evolution of the Boy Scout manual from 1911 to the present. The section on “Firemanship” caught my eye (emphasis mine):
What’s interesting here is that, as reflected in the change in the badge’s name, the 1911 badge is geared towards preparing the Scout to actually fight the fire and rescue people (as if encouraging boys to rush into a burning building was the most natural thing in the world), while the modern badge focuses on how to prevent and escape fires. It also includes that crucial skill: how to safely light a candle!
While it is no doubt comforting to know that The Boy Scouts can lead the way in candle lighting, such pursuits are of a different sort than was encouraged in days gone by.
It’s a truism to be sure, but one worth stating, that little boys are not like little girls. The brothers who co-wrote The Dangerous Book For Boys hint at some of the differences in an interview:
[Boys] need to fall off things occasionally or . . . they’ll take worse risks on their own. If we do away with challenging playgrounds and cancel school trips for fear of being sued, we don’t end up with safer boys–we end up with them walking on train tracks.
Another clue to the inclinations of little boys can be found in a recent exchange between my 3-year-old grandson and his father:
Father: What are you doing?
Son: I’m killing ALL the bugs with my shovel.
Father: Ya know, sometimes it’s okay to be nice to the bugs.
Son: It’s not your turn.
No one who has raised little boys will be at all surprised by this exchange. (When I was a little boy, we used magnifying glasses to focus the sun’s rays, transforming red ant colonies into smoking wastelands. My grandson’s shovel will do, however, until he’s old enough for his own magnifying glass.)
Boys, bless their hearts, are little men of action. And their motivations and aspirations have, for the most part, little to do with placid conversation or droning on about their feelings.
This brings me to modern cartoons…
As a grandfather, I spend a fair amount of time each week wallowing around on the floor with my grandkids, making jokes intended to provoke an eye-rolling response and sometimes piling together with the kids on the couch to watch cartoons. So being a grandfather brings me into close contact with the state of modern cartoonery in all its glory.
I find that modern cartoons are very often informational, and they routinely hector the kids about relationships and the environment, but they are almost never aspirational. There isn’t much on offer that aspires to courage or derring-do. There is a lot of time spent dancing and singing and talking about feelings and being a good neighbor. But it’s seldom, if at all, that the kids in the cartoons are presented with opportunities to take daring action in an important cause. I think this state of affairs shortchanges and underestimates the lion-hearted little boys who watch TV.
When I was a kid, I remember watching Jonny Quest and being caught up in the weekly adventure of how this kid, who was within reach of my own age, could take action and think clearly and show courage. Even the gang on Scooby-Doo, with Shaggy’s less than enthusiastic participation, was nevertheless still willing to take action to bring down the bad guys.
In many of the cartoons today, there aren’t really good guys and bad guys, there are mostly just neighbors, friends, and “different” people. The characters spend a lot of time talking and sitting around and thinking about themselves. There is not much requirement or even opportunity for courage beyond the self-congratulatory “courage” entailed in being nice to some new kid. (This is not to denigrate the virtue of being nice to the new kid, just that I’m not at all sure it isn’t a blatant case of grade inflation to call it “courage”.)
Of course, it isn’t just cartoons that have become this kind of watery milk of entertainment. We have already seen how the Boy Scouts blunted the sharp end of expectations over the years. But I think discomfort with the boyishness of boys is very much a widespread cultural phenomenon.
I first noticed this when my own boys started attending Sunday school at our then local church. When I was a kid, I grew up hearing and reading about David and Goliath and Gideon, Joshua and Caleb, and many other men of action. These stories were aspirational for me in that they appealed to some inner sense, common I believe in little boys, that I wanted to act boldly in some great cause.
When my own boys started going to church, I kept waiting to hear them talking about these stories but it seemed that every Sunday, all they ever learned about was one more item on a never-ending list of things that God had created. Now, I’m all in favor of learning about the things God created. But God also created more than a few men of action who acted boldly and at great personal risk in his cause. I soon discovered that if my own boys were going to find out about these kinds of stories, it wasn’t going to be at church. (Not all churches are this way and, truth be told, there were many things I loved about that church. I just wasn’t a fan of the Sunday school curriculum.)
I took to calling this watered down, adventureless approach to Sunday school the “God Made the Frogs” curriculum. On a related but ironic note, while God certainly made the frogs, He also made the little boys who have a special aptitude for killing them. They don’t say “fun for the boys but death for the frogs” for nothing. But I digress.
There is more than an element of truth to Aristotle’s observation that “courage is the first virtue because it makes all others possible”. Children know and sense the importance of courage and are anxious to be inspired. I think they understand more than we give them credit for.
In this, as in many other things, I think Russell Kirk had it right when he said,
Published in General“In a violent time, it is prudent to rear children on tales of peril — and of heroism. If enough of the rising generation take the heroes of fantasy for their exemplars, the wolf will find sustenance less readily. ‘What sharp teeth you have!’ ‘The better to eat you with, my dear.’ Give us more woodcutters, in the nick of time.”
So much to think about here—and to be amused by, thank you—and a well chosen example of one of the reasons that every boy needs a grandpa. Please take good care of yourselves, men!
“We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.” – C.S. Lewis
You have already contributed so much in your short time here, Keith! What a fine writer and storyteller. Keep ’em coming!
You’re very kind Susan. Thanks for the encouragement.
I agree so much with your observations. When I was raising our boys, there were frequent “discussions” with their mother about risk taking. We lived in a house whose back yard abutted a pond. She wanted to build a fence so that they couldn’t toddle in and drown. I advocated swimming lessons. She wanted a gate at the top of the stairs so they wouldn’t fall down; I taught them the game of sliding down feet first on their bellies. I always talked to the kids about rational risk taking, and let them choose to act in ways they decided, as long they understood the risks and ramifications or possible outcomes of each outcome. When we were out bouldering, do you want to leap across that chasm or walk around? Can you scale that face without a safety rope? Determine how you will get out of that cave tunnel, before you climb down in. These were the discussions I would have with the kids. They remarkably self-assessed risks versus their capabilities and made choices about actions. Most times they succeeded, sometimes they failed. When they failed, they almost always reassessed, and tried again until figuring out a way to conquer their personal challenge. This helped them mature into confident adventurous men.
I have a young coworker (25) who fancies himself a man, and he has potential. He resembles the kids in todays modern cartoons, as you so perfectly described: “The characters spend a lot of time talking and sitting around and thinking about themselves.” At heart, he is really very kind, even though he is totally self-absorbed. My wife and I have kind of adopted him into our fold and are working with and on him to help him mature and grow. We call him our puppy. He likes that. A post for another day perhaps.
Sorry for the digression. Bottom line, your post is a very astute observation, with which I concur.
You’re a natural, Keith. I think you might be one of those rare birds who actually did become wiser as he grew older.
“Fun for the boys but death for the frogs” is a common saying? Where are you from, some weird place like Rhode Island where they say things like that?
Irrefutable.
We have not spent as much time with our grandchildren as we would like (curse you Gov. Grisham of New Mexico), but I have seen some of the cartoons our 3 year old grandson watches. One does have a villain, but the “good” characters never take direct action against the villain – he always gets his comeuppance by circumstance or by the backfiring of his own actions. Others have “heroes,” but the heroes are all transformer-like characters in the roles of “professional” rescuers for which they were specifically designed and built. Nothing to suggest that the “regular person” characters could do anything other than call the “professionals.”
On the other hand, the 3 year old has asked for a doll or two, and seems to want the dolls (or “babies”) as objects to protect against “bad guys.” He also sometimes takes on a persona as protector of his 15 month old sister. And much to the consternation of my lefty son-in-law, he puts sticks to work as guns for taking down “bad guys.” So, he has some idea of being a hero, but there doesn’t seem to be much that encourages him in that direction.
When I lived in western New York state (think lots of snow), the county tried for years to prevent sledding at a particular hill in the county park near my house. Finally, the county gave up and just put snow fences around some of the more prominent obstacles. I enjoyed watching the dads and kids out assessing the steepness of the various parts of the hill, the different densities of obstacles, the run-out room, etc. to decide if the run was worth the risk.
@kentforrester This made me laugh. I am, as it happens, mostly a Texan. I’m not sure if that is a Texan colloquialism, or where it originated to be honest. It’s shorthand for that universe of things that’s fun for the doer but not so much for anyone who happens to be within the blast zone radius.
Goethe had some observations about policies such as the prohibition of sledding and their effect on character development in boys. Snowballs, Sleds, and Cultures.
Thoughts on Courage, at Marginal Revolution.
I am not a mysogynist, but it seems to me that if there is anything aspirational in modern entertainment for the young it is directed at girls.
When they were growing up, my sons would eat their lunchtime sandwiches into the shape of handguns and shoot each other across the table.
Not Texan. Greek.
To a boy, everything is a gun.
I grew up in Orchard Park NY, sounds like the stuff they did at Chestnut Ridge Park.
Or a sword.
Nice thoughtful post. I’m definitely in agreement with the War on Boys and Men Without Chests problem in current culture.
Johnny Quest was an excellent example of inspiring kids’ entertainment. My childhood was devoted to Thunderbirds, and I’m still a passionate fan at 68. I wasn’t all that crazy about the marionettes, but the aircraft and the sets were amazing to a kid who built models…and the explosions! That was practical special effects in its elemental state. Most of the SFX was directed by Derek Meddings, who went on to do 2001 for Kubrick, a bunch of James Bond movies, and the early Superman movies.
A few years ago I found a biography of Gerry Anderson, the producer of Thunderbirds. The author asked him if, when he was creating the show, he made the heroes Americans because he wanted the show to sell to American networks. He said, yes, that was part of it, but (and here I’m quoting from memory but it’s close), “Think about it. This is an organization that shows up when people need rescuing, help whoever needs help, and then they leave. They don’t ask to get paid, they don’t even ask for thanks. No government is telling them to do it. They do it because it’s their chosen mission. Only Americans would do that. If we made them British or French, no one would believe it.”
Hold my beer.
Even as a kid I couldn’t tolerate the puppets, but I really enjoyed the live-action movie.
Other producer types have made similar points. But as I recall, The Champions were not American – at least not mostly – and they seemed to help anyone, but maybe that’s why the show didn’t last. :-)
It also reminds me of this, which I thought I had heard in “The Americanization Of Emily” but apparently it was actually real:
P.S. My brother just sent me the complete DVD set of Jonny (no h) Quest.