One of the things that I have noticed while watching American Idol is the growing trend in American culture towards protecting children from defeat and disappointment. I also saw an HBO report that reinforced my thinking that this trend is morphing into a national obsession. The report featured a school that banned dodge ball because it was too violent and caused the kids who lost to feel bad about themselves. The same report also talked about another school that banned the game of tag because of the stigma that came with being “it.” You may have heard about how some schools, including the University of California Santa Cruz, that got rid of grades because the kids who got bad grades were suffering from reduced self-esteem.
I am not a parent so perhaps this colors my judgment, but I find this to be very distressing and not the way to teach children. I may not have kids but I was one once, and to be honest I was not very good at dodge ball, or any other sport for that matter. And yes, my self-esteem did suffer, but I got over it, as did millions of other kids who went through the same ordeal. I learned about disappointment, I learned what it is like to fail, and I think those lessons were valuable in that I had to learn how to deal with defeat later in life. The fact is that we cannot always get what we want. I was watching the Indy 500 time trials Sunday and there was one driver, Alex Tagliani, who missed qualifying for the race by a mere few hundredths of a second. He was sitting in his car waiting to qualify but ran out of time, and he just sat in his car with tears in his eyes when he realized that he was not going to make the race.
Now imagine if Alex had been taught as a kid that there is no such thing as failure, or that he never had to experience what is like to fail, can you imagine how he would have reacted? He would probably have thrown a temper tantrum, throwing his steering wheel at anybody within range, and demanded that the track make an exception to their 100 year old rule and allow him to qualify after the time to do so had expired. Not very sportsmanlike behavior is it? But that is what I think this generation of kids is being taught. Let’s face it, life sucks sometimes, but if you never had to deal with that until you’re an adult then it’ll be a lot harder for you to accept, which will make it harder for the rest of us to deal with you.
What does this have to do with American Idol? Glad you asked. I have always wondered why some people who clearly have no musical talent still try out for the show and still react as if they have been shot when they are rejected. How in the world can these kids think that they are good enough singers to qualify to compete on this show? Well, when you have been told all of your life that you are a great singer by parents who should know better but instead want to keep their kids happy, and then of course they are going to react angrily when some ornery guy from England and his loopy counterparts say they can’t sing.
Then there is the current saga of contestant Kris Allen, who is in the final 2 even though his singing voice is weaker than at least half of the final 13 contestants this season. The main reason he is in the finale is because there are millions of pre-teen girls out there who think Kris is absolutely adorable and are voting for him hundreds, perhaps even thousands of times each. Now keep in mind that each one of those votes costs money, 10 cents a vote I think, and last week there were 88 million total votes, which means that somebody will have to pay $8.8 million in phone bills. I think it is safe to say that it won’t be the pre-teen girls that are doing all of this voting. But how many parents out there will take these girls’ cell phones away when that $300 phone bill shows up? So far, not many, and that may explain why Kris is still in the competition.
What we need here is more parents who act like parents and less parents who act like their kid's friend. I'm not talking about deliberately subjecting kids to defeat and misery, I'm talking about just being parents. My parents did it, my brother and sister-in-law are doing it, I have friends who are doing it, why can't the rest of America?
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