Parent Crap, Reviewed: Little Pim Videos

The first thing you need to know is that my wife, my daughter and myself are assholes. Not the mean type, but the annoying type. The kind of horrible, disgusting yuppie parents you see in this wonderfully entertaining video:

The second thing you need to know is that that video, written in probably 30 minutes, is hundreds of times more interesting and informative than the Little Pim series of language education videos. That is, the Little Pim videos, which are intended to help small kids learn French, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic and half a dozen other tongues, are boring. Here’s how they go:

Picture 21The series stars an animated panda, Pim, who rolls around and doesn’t speak or really do much of anything. There is no story. Rather, things progress thematically, through subjects like food. There’s a video clip of an apple and someone speaks the word “apple” in whichever language you’re watching. Kids eat apples, the word is repeated a bunch, and then it’s on to the next fruit. Whee. Every time Sasha, who’s 2, saw this, she demanded I give her an apple.

And that, sadly, was about as involved as she ever got with the series (Little Pim had sent me the Chinese and French DVDs for review). She never requested us to play it again, and I can’t imagine she learned anything from it.

Not that she doesn’t want to learn languages! This is a kid who speaks a good deal of Mandarin already (thanks to her Taiwanese mother, Chinese nannies, and bilingual preschool), as well as some ASL, thanks to the “Baby Signing Time” series of videos. But Little Pim just didn’t capture her imagination.

What’s the difference, then, between Little Pim, Baby Signing Time, and Sasha’s Chinese education? Well, far be it from me to cast scientific doubt on the Entertainment Immersion Method™ developed by Julia Pimsleur Levine, daughter of the renowned language teacher Paul Pimsleur, but it’s missing what I consider a vital element: song.

Sasha’s Chinese education is, for example, far from organized. My wife tries to speak it at home, but as often as not she ends up combining English and Mandarin within a single sentence. And at Preschool of America, Chinese is just sort of thrown into the mix, but not necessarily “taught” explicitly. Sasha, however, knows tons of Chinese-language songs—”Twinkle, Twinkle,” “Ba lobo,” “Liang zhi laohu“—and even sings them to herself, often without our prompting. She’s learned them from CDs we have at home, and from song circle time at school. And whenever we let her watch “Ni Hao, Kai-lan!” she’ll actually say “Ni hao!” to the TV. She loves this stuff because it captures her imagination, instead of presenting her with the preschool version of facts.

Likewise with sign language. The Baby Signing Time series was built entirely around songs—”Sunny Day,” “I’m a Bug,” and so on—and although Sasha’s kind of outgrown the series, she continues to sing the tunes and reference their lyrics out in the real world. And this is in a series of videos that are teaching her how to communicate with deaf people!

So, look. I won’t say Little Pim won’t effectively teach your child how to say a few words in Russian. But it’s hard for me to imagine any kid becoming truly attached to the roly-poly digital panda, or screeching demands to watch the videos again and again and again. Which is, as much as we parents hate it, a pretty damn good sign that our kids take something seriously.

Beware the Video Monkey on Your Back

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My mother is coming to town for Thanksgiving, which can mean but one thing for JP and Ellie: GRANDPARENT BRIBERY BONANZA! Yes, good ole Grandma Diane knows better than to get around the grandkids without peace offerings in the form of clothing, books, sketchpads, candy, and, in this case for JP, videogames.

I’m a little ambivalent about exposing JP to gaming at this age (4), although I admit that ultimately it’s inevitable. I have bought him some sort-of educational computer games, which he loves, but I’ve been unwilling to go beyond that to anything Xbox, or Nintendo, or whatever the heck it’s called. (Can you tell I’m not a devoted gamer?) But my mother, alas, has no such compunctions.

In fact, early this morning I had to talk her down off the ledge from buying JP a fucking iPad, for a 4-year-old. Why doesn’t she just get him hooked on lattes, implant the tracking chip in his brain, and get him working at Wired? There’s really nothing left.

And in the meantime, she can help me flee the angry mob of parent-haters who will come after me with pitchforks if they see my little boy smashing such an expensive and coveted piece of technology to bits on the sidewalk (which he most assuredly would do). Sorry, JP, it’s a no-go. Instead he will get grandma’s now-broken iPhone.

I am so fucked.

Taiwanese Internet Parent-Child Endangerment Video!

Now that wacky Taiwanese reenactment videos have become a reputable genre in their own right–akin to Noh theater and the bromance films–I imagine it’s time for DadWagon to forward along the latest, kiddie-related specimen. This one is about whether or not parent over-sharing on the Intertubes brings harm to our offspring. Since we here at DadWagon have already weighed in on this momentous issue (in our great wisdom), I’m going to leave my opinions out of this one, and you can just enjoy.

Video and the Origin of the Species

From my friend SkimKim, who has a funny and profane foodblog from the urban wastelands (and who showed me how to dismember a goat last year), comes this pretty incredible piece of existentialist urban stop-motion wall animation (does that cover it?). I’m not gonna try to make this be about fatherhood, except to say that imagination apparently doesn’t desert everyone after childhood. Some people manage to keep it alive and well. More power to them.

I don’t know much about the artist(s) who did this–you can find them here–but they work is sort of like Banksy in motion, which reminds me again of the awesomeness that was Santa’s Ghetto, the Bethlehem art/relief project from a few years back.  Anyhow, check them out. Amazing work.