GROWING UP ABSURD

From: Can the Crocodile Kid bring back the millions to Australia's shores? (Bernard Lagan, The Times, January 10th, 2007)

She is barely eight years old and lost her father, Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter, only four months ago. But today Bindi Irwin will travel to the United States to seek stardom — amid muted fears that she is being pushed too far, too fast from a childhood already interrupted by tragedy.

Bindi Irwin is to front a new 26-episode show, Bindi, the Jungle Girl, that is to be shown on the Discovery Kids channel.

Australian tourism chiefs, for whom her father was a golden asset, have picked up on Bindi’s emerging fame and have given her top billing in events in Los Angeles and New York for G’Day USA Week, a promotion aimed at bolstering tourism to Australia. She is also scheduled to appear with leading talk-show hosts including David Letterman and Ellen DeGeneres, give a speech to the National Press Club in Washington and perform on stage with the internationally known Australian child entertainers the Wiggles.

Outwardly, she goes with the backing of most Australians, who were moved by the brave eulogy she delivered at her father’s memorial service. Child psychologists who posed questions about her ability to fill her father’s shoes — her stated ambition — were met with public words of reassurance from her mother, Terri, and Irwin’s manager, John Stainton, both of whom emphasised that the course was Bindi’s choice. In an editorial yesterday, though, the Melbourne Age newspaper bluntly put the questions about Irwin Inc that many Australians harbour but few are prepared to ask.

“Clearly studios can see the same talent in her that made her father a household name — the next generation. But a fitness video, a cooking video, an appearance with The Wiggles — is it too much, too soon?” said The Age. “Her affinity with nature, like her father’s, is well documented and those who support her have always said this is the life Bindi wants for herself. Can she understand it? From here, the public is part of her life. So before we make a heroine out of this little girl, as we made a hero of her father, let’s look at her tiny shoulders and wonder how they could support such a burden.”

Stainton defended Bindi’s busy schedule yesterday, saying that she would not have to do anything she did not want. “My criterion is, if Bindi doesn’t want to do it that day, if she wants to go to the zoo or the beach, then that’s what we’re doing. That is the priority; it is what she wants to do.”

And we all know how eight year olds that get to do exactly what they want as the world cheers them on become such pleasant, happy and solid adults. There is nothing particularly new about celebrity children, but at least Disney assured us Annette Funicello would be forced to do her homework every night.

What is interesting here is how the concerns about this madness are “muted”, presumably a euphemism for the fact that nobody knows how to articulate them with any confidence. One might think that a precocious eight year old girl determined to follow in the footsteps of a possessed father who was killed for his recklessness might benefit from some strict hands-on parenting, if not a few years locked in a convent. And why is it assumed the problem is that the little darling is being pushed too far? She presents on television as one who is having a ball and just can’t wait to stick her head into a croc’s mouth or cuddle up to a cobra on The Discovery Channel. She isn’t being pushed too far, she is being abandoned.

Bindi is an expression of the sea-change in our perceptions of children and child-raising that have arisen since the sixties and seventies. Whereas before children were by and large seen as adorable but selfish blobs to be molded by love, guidance and discipline, now more and more we hold they are born without original sin with an innate potential to fulfill their destinies as Olympic champions, award-winning film directors or corporate magnates provided we, the adults in their lives, don’t damage their fragile little psyches by setting boundaries against their wishes, boring them or giving them enfeebling complexes by telling them there really are things that go bump in the night. So frightened have we become of our own children that we retreat more and more from the duties of parenthood, but we aren’t brave enough to acknowledge this, so we call it freedom. Raising them in conscious reaction to carefully cultivated images of strict, loveless Victorian gloom that we keep in the forefront of our minds, whether we suffered them or not, we hide from ourselves the fact that we have no idea what virtues and values we should be trying to impart to them. Which is really not terribly surprising considering there are so few we impose on ourselves anymore.