When Childhood Affection Becomes an (Extended) Family Affair...
The late morning party at the poolside of the local tennis-cum-swimming-random-conference-hosting family club was reaching its climax: the little star of the party: a baby boy turning one-year-old tomorrow was about to blow the candle on his little birthday cake from the comfort of his mom's lap. The entire attendance of the party, some two dozen family members, friends, and coworkers, gathered around the cake, the boy, and the happy parents, clapping and singing the birthday song. They broke into spontaneous laughter every time the boy cooed or smiled, and captured all that on their cameras.
As the dozen cameras flashed away to capture every action of the boy in front of his three-layered Sesame Street-themed cake, waiting for the kid to finally plunge the plastic knife into the blue tower with a sugary Elmo figure on top, one of the elders in the audience casually quipped (rather loudly) to those around him: "kids these days...so sheltered...really helping us drive up our living costs, huh?" While almost everyone ignored the comment and continued to click away on their cameras, the content of the comment was just so spotted on...
For one moment that anyone chose not to just focus on the kid, the cake, or the cameras, and instead look from afar at the whole situation under that plastic shed by the pool, the sight can almost be appropriately described as laughingly ludicrous. Here there was an one-year-old kid getting a massive cake, right next to a massive pile of birthday gifts, standing in front of people in the thirties behaving like enthusiastic paparazzi who somehow luckily found themselves in the (most silent) news conference of the biggest celebrity rock star in the world.
Ludicrous as it seems, it certainly does not signify anything wrong from a strictly parental/familial perspective. Who does not want their child to grow up with the understanding that they are surrounded by affection, not just from their life-giving parental units, but a whole host of people who may not even know him that particularly well. Researches do show that mental health of adults are strongly correlated with the environment under which one went through one's formative years. Naturally, becoming the center of attention is the preferred display of collective affection.
Yet one has to wonder just how the child will transition into his being such center of attention, especially being that center of attention is expressed through materialistic means. Seeing the piles of gifts (mostly toys) presented to the young boy for his first birthday celebrations reminds myself of a time when my parents bought expensive console games (each of which costing up of 5% of their meagre combined incomes) when I was growing up. For a young boy, it is simply unfathomable the difficulties adults must go through to display their affections.
What is scary is that some kids never grow up to understand difficulties. They become leeches slowly sucking away their families' hard-earned cash without the slightest sense of gratitude. Just as badly, their parents also never mature into responsible caretakers when they continue to treat their babies as center of their (economic) world and lavish them with every gift and satisfy their every demand into the late teens and twenties just as they have when the baby was, well, still a baby. What began as innocent smiles in front of a new pile of plastic toys can slowly but surely turn into a financial burden.
It is not hard, then, to connect the celebrity treatment a baby receives with the continued decline of birthrate among middle-class families, here in Malaysia as it is elsewhere. On one hand, it is because there are so few kids that each kid gets so much attention. But also on the other hand, it is because the "attention" needs to be backed up with money spent on gifts, classes, and various activities for fun and for learning that force families to restrict the number of kids they can have. To make sure the kids understand our love, we the adults have decided to tie up our own financial freedoms.
And all this, it starts with the young boy blowing out the little candle on his little cake. His smile still betrays an utter obliviousness to the reasons his myriad uncles and aunties are fighting to get his attention, a smile, a yell, anything at all. But, in a future not so distant, he will come to understand, slowly but surely, the socio-economic complexities of the adult world, and how he can exploit them for his personal benefits. One day, the smiles behind the birthday cake will become not innocent but calculating...the elder is correct to quip, and we are all correct to be worried.
As the dozen cameras flashed away to capture every action of the boy in front of his three-layered Sesame Street-themed cake, waiting for the kid to finally plunge the plastic knife into the blue tower with a sugary Elmo figure on top, one of the elders in the audience casually quipped (rather loudly) to those around him: "kids these days...so sheltered...really helping us drive up our living costs, huh?" While almost everyone ignored the comment and continued to click away on their cameras, the content of the comment was just so spotted on...
For one moment that anyone chose not to just focus on the kid, the cake, or the cameras, and instead look from afar at the whole situation under that plastic shed by the pool, the sight can almost be appropriately described as laughingly ludicrous. Here there was an one-year-old kid getting a massive cake, right next to a massive pile of birthday gifts, standing in front of people in the thirties behaving like enthusiastic paparazzi who somehow luckily found themselves in the (most silent) news conference of the biggest celebrity rock star in the world.
Ludicrous as it seems, it certainly does not signify anything wrong from a strictly parental/familial perspective. Who does not want their child to grow up with the understanding that they are surrounded by affection, not just from their life-giving parental units, but a whole host of people who may not even know him that particularly well. Researches do show that mental health of adults are strongly correlated with the environment under which one went through one's formative years. Naturally, becoming the center of attention is the preferred display of collective affection.
Yet one has to wonder just how the child will transition into his being such center of attention, especially being that center of attention is expressed through materialistic means. Seeing the piles of gifts (mostly toys) presented to the young boy for his first birthday celebrations reminds myself of a time when my parents bought expensive console games (each of which costing up of 5% of their meagre combined incomes) when I was growing up. For a young boy, it is simply unfathomable the difficulties adults must go through to display their affections.
What is scary is that some kids never grow up to understand difficulties. They become leeches slowly sucking away their families' hard-earned cash without the slightest sense of gratitude. Just as badly, their parents also never mature into responsible caretakers when they continue to treat their babies as center of their (economic) world and lavish them with every gift and satisfy their every demand into the late teens and twenties just as they have when the baby was, well, still a baby. What began as innocent smiles in front of a new pile of plastic toys can slowly but surely turn into a financial burden.
It is not hard, then, to connect the celebrity treatment a baby receives with the continued decline of birthrate among middle-class families, here in Malaysia as it is elsewhere. On one hand, it is because there are so few kids that each kid gets so much attention. But also on the other hand, it is because the "attention" needs to be backed up with money spent on gifts, classes, and various activities for fun and for learning that force families to restrict the number of kids they can have. To make sure the kids understand our love, we the adults have decided to tie up our own financial freedoms.
And all this, it starts with the young boy blowing out the little candle on his little cake. His smile still betrays an utter obliviousness to the reasons his myriad uncles and aunties are fighting to get his attention, a smile, a yell, anything at all. But, in a future not so distant, he will come to understand, slowly but surely, the socio-economic complexities of the adult world, and how he can exploit them for his personal benefits. One day, the smiles behind the birthday cake will become not innocent but calculating...the elder is correct to quip, and we are all correct to be worried.
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