Parental placation

The end of Western civilization is coming, and it's coming to your local grocery store as a green and purple shopping cart. That's right, Barney is invading Meijer.\nThe New Zealand-based Cabco Group recently introduced its "mobile children's entertainment" device to American markets: the TV Kart, a shopping cart with a built-in LCD screen. No longer will your ill-behaved and undisciplined child make a scene in the cereal aisle because you won't buy her Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. For the low price of $1, you can placate your little hellion with all the Barney, Bob the Builder and Wiggles her little zombified mind can take. The transition from the living room TV to the Escalade's headrest DVD player to the TV Kart will be almost seamless.\nAs tragic as it is that American parents have relinquished child-rearing to the "stupid box," a more sinister reality awaits the society that supports such a sedated life. In "The Closing of the American Mind," Allan Bloom distills thousands of years of Western philosophy into man's struggle between his selfish, brutish nature and his need for society. Bloom writes: "We have the same needs as the beasts, but we also create and must live in social groups for our survival; without society the human race would die out."\nChildhood is when we begin to understand society and our place in it. In the home, with siblings and parents, a child begins the slow learning process through trial and error: It's OK to play Legos with your brother; it's not OK to punch your brother. It's OK to kiss your mother goodnight; it's not OK to announce your hatred for meatloaf at the dinner table as your mother serves you meatloaf.\nAppointing the TV as the all-time babysitter deprives children of valuable lessons in socializing. Our kids' ever-increasing exposure to television can only decrease their opportunities to learn how to live. If the trend continues, we might eventually become a society of reticent misfits, contentedly rotting away before the new opiate of the masses and stalking each other on Facebook.\nI have no children of my own, but I like to think I have some parental experience. My little brother is 12 years younger than me. On many occasions I've been entrusted with his care for days or weeks. Most recently the two of us went on a 10-day backpacking trip in Colorado. There I learned that 9-year-old boys are content to eat Laffy Taffy all day long, to the exclusion of any other nourishment. But because I love my brother, his diet that week was far healthier than a Laffy Taffy binge. \nI'm sure that children are content to watch Barney while Mom shops. For that matter, they're probably content to watch TV all day long. But a loving parent will realize that children are not the wisest arbiters of their own fates.