Parenting Isn't a Sometimes Job

One of my occasional guilty pleasures, a comic strip called PvP, alerted me to an upcoming event on Sesame Street: Cookie Monster is changing his tune.

In response to the epidemic of childhood obesity, Cookie Monster will be severely toning down his affinity for cookies. (Read this story on CNN.com.)

PvP author Scott Kurtz received a great deal of criticism for his ridiculing of Cookie Monster's revelation that "A cookie is a sometimes food." His rebuke of his critics in the next day's strip was less than civil, IMO, but his point was worth making, that you don’t have to have children (Kurtz has none) to have insights about parenting. My wife and I had many, many opinions about raising children before we had our son, and just about all of them have been validated so far. In fact, the biggest surprise was that we would love our child as much as we do.

Ruth and I are part of the first generation who learned to read and count from Sesame Street. We learned our values, though, from our parents. Actually, it was our parents who taught us that reading and counting were valuable. Sesame Street just helped us learn how to do it. It was always a foregone conclusion that Cookie Monster was a caricature, not a role model. We never thought of making a meal out of cookies. Well, okay, we thought of it, but we knew better, and even if we didn’t, we had parents who watched what we ate.

It’s asinine to think that Sesame Street has to spell out simple rules of life because parents aren’t doing it. If kids don’t care what they eat, it’s because their parents don’t care, and Cookie Monster reforming his diet will do nothing to curb childhood obesity. Furthermore, Big Bird and The Count won’t teach kids anything if parents don’t teach their kids that reading and counting are important. No effort by PBS can compensate for inept or absent parents.

What’s next? Oscar the Grouch will go to counseling and learn how to be nicer to people. Or worse, he’ll get medication.