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Published in The Brownsville Herald – Mother’s Day 5-14,2006
While traveling by car for the last month or so I noted a very disturbing radio advertisement for Saturn Automobiles.
Essentially, Saturn is encouraging the purchase of their vehicle with a DVD player so that the parent would not have to answer questions from their children; because when children watch movies they don’t ask questions. The poor judgment in this was amplified frequently, when a public service announcement advocating the use of every possible chance with their children to provide “learning moments” immediately followed.
The sad thing is, I have yet to see any indication, from any source, that there is anything wrong with the shutting communications off to our kids with a movie.
While our children were growing up, I remember many questions that I often thought were designed to show how dumb mom and dad were, and while I like to think we acquitted ourselves well, I am sure that mom made more of the “learning moments” than I did.
On one occasion, my son inquired as to how radios worked; and I remembered what my dad did when I asked him the same question, 50 years earlier. My dad told me that when you want to know something as detailed as radio, (most things I asked turned out to be detailed) we must go to the library and look it up.
So my son and I went and looked it up!
We found the basics of a crystal radio, then purchased the parts and built one from scratch. Amazingly, it worked the first time.
After that small success, it dawned on me that my dad was indeed much smarter than I gave him credit for.
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