Danielsaurus

Struck Out, Before Even Up to Bat

Africa’s first Little League baseball team to advance to the Little League World Series, the Rev. John Foundation Little League team from Kampala, Uganda, unfortunately won’t be able to appear at the series after all – the result of a lack of complete documentation for the children and complications with the United States’ visa and immigration policies, which prevent them from traveling to the annual South Williamsport, Pa., event.

A disappointment all around, but especially for the kids:

“It’s a shame,” [documentary filmmaker] Shapiro said. “Their country isn’t ready for this. The schools aren’t ready. The parents aren’t ready. The only thing that’s ready are the kids and their talent. They will make it one day, and if there is anything positive out of this, it’s for people to realize what wonderful things are happening with these kids. They’ve got their own little world growing here.”

UPDATE: More from the kids themselves, and a bit of history about the fledgling roots of Little League baseball in Africa, here.

2011’s ‘State of America’s Children’ Report

The report, issued annually by the Children’s Defense Fund, paints an especially grim picture. Marian Wright Edelman shares more:

With rampant unemployment, housing foreclosures, homelessness, hunger, and massive looming federal and state budget cuts, children’s well-being is in great jeopardy. One in five children is poor and children are our nation’s poorest age group. Child poverty increased almost 10 percent between 2008 and 2009, the largest single year increase since data were first collected.

I’ve never been fond of the ‘child-saving’ attitude that organizations like the Children’s Defense Fund tack toward: they tend to portray children as a passive group without much individual agency, and their solutions to children’s problems almost solely tend to rely on adults stepping in to “protect” children and “childhood”. Nevertheless, it’s vital to acknowledge the larger systemic context America’s children live in – a context which is increasingly being defined by poverty. That the blight of poverty is inflicted disproportionately and mercilessly upon our nation’s children is a disgrace. That it has continued this way for so long without any glimmer of hope on the horizon, well, that’s just sickening.

Sixth Graders File Complaint Against Toys"R"Us for Gender Discrimination

Last October, a group of sixth-graders in Sweden filed an official complaint with their country’s advertising regulatory agency against the Toys”R”Us corporation. The reason for the complaint? Because the kids felt the toy company’s catalogue was gender-discriminatory.

According to the youngsters, the Toys”R”Us Christmas catalogue featured “outdated gender roles because boys and girls were shown playing with different types of toys, whereby the boys were portrayed as active and the girls as passive”, according to a statement from Ro [Sweden’s regulatory agency].

The group’s teacher explained to the local Smålandsposten newspaper that filing the complaint was the culmination of more than two years of “long-term work” by the students on gender roles.

Thumbing through the catalogue, 13-year-old Hannes Psajd explained that he and his twin sister had always shared the same toys and that he was concerned about the message sent by the Toys”R”Us publication. “Small girls in princess stuff…and here are boys dressed as super heroes. It’s obvious that you get affected by this,” he told the newspaper. “When I see that only girls play with certain things then, as a guy, I don’t want it.”

Classmate Moa Averin emphasized the importance of children being able to be who they want even if “guys want to be princesses sometimes”.

Two thoughts here, if I may…

First, how absolutely great is this? That a group of young kids not only took a big political step to advocate for an issue they cared about, but that the issue itself is what they felt was gender discrimination? I see what these kids did as many great things, but most important it was a bold declaration against adults trying to put them into a box – against a corporation trying to exploit them, by playing into and contributing to culturally defined childhood gender roles, all for the purpose of selling cheap toy products. If you don’t think kids are cognizant of the ways society tries to transmit cultural expectations like gender roles, and are fully active in questioning and challenging those expectations, then think again. Kids see the world in a whole new way, one that’s uniquely their own – and they won’t let anyone else dictate it.

Second, leave it to a country like Sweden to not only hear a complaint filed by a group of children but also eagerly embrace and encourage the children’s activism while doing so. Following a review of the case, Sweden’s regulatory agency chose to agree with the children, and they issued Toys”R”Us a public reprimand – echoing the children’s sentiments in it by declaring that the toy company’s catalogue “discriminates based on gender and counteracts positive social behaviour, lifestyles, and attitudes.” Apparently the kids aren’t the only ones who understand and value the importance of them having the freedom culturally to be whomever they want to be.

I’d say that deserves at least two big cheers – one for the group of children themselves and their hard work in making their voice on a topic known, and another for Sweden’s government for taking that voice so seriously.

Society’s Bias Against Video Games

Scott Steinberg, an author and advocate for the video game industry, in an op-ed for CNN:

In 1993, the Senate’s hearings on video game violence gave birth to the Entertainment Software Rating Board and the industry’s current rating system: E for everyone, M for mature (17 and older) and so on. Later this year, the U.S. Supreme Court will test the constitutionality of a California law that would make it illegal to sell violent video games to minors.

But what gaming insiders find most surprising isn’t that such arguments remain topical. It’s that some 30 years after video games became a popular form of mainstream entertainment, we’re still liable to hear less about games’ positive impact on kids’ lives than sensationalistic accounts of their hidden dangers.

“Games are an amazing invention that entertain and inform in ways different than traditional media,” says Joseph Olin, president of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences. “But many critics have little or any experience with them and therefore don’t understand where there could be artistic or educational value. No different than with film and TV, media sensationalism and ignorance can contribute to the fear that games are harmful to children.

Technology and Nature, Sitting in a Tree

Well-timed to serve as a coincidental but completely appropriate follow-up to the piece I wrote earlier today (wherein I rant about how much other people rant about children), Richard Louv shares the right way to think about the topic of children, technology and nature:

Many people believe that technology is the antithesis of nature. Here’s an alternate view. A fishing rod is technology. So is that fancy backpack. Or a compass. Or a tent. When boomers my age ran through the woods with play guns (as distasteful as that might be to some people), they were using technology as an entry tool to nature.

Today, the family that together goes geo-caching or wildlife photographing with their digital cameras, or collecting pond samples, is doing something as legitimate as going fishing; both involve gadgets that offer an excuse to get outside. Young citizen naturalists are bound to have a different attitude about technology from many older people — and that could be an advantage.

Louv, as you may know, is a renowned environmentalist and a prolific writer – perhaps best recognized for his tremendous book Last Child in the Woods. Needless to say, it’s nice to hear words like these coming from someone like him, who is regarded as the perennial expert on the subject of children and nature.

He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia

Henry Jenkins questions what was so wrong about the He-Man action figure toys that his son used to play with back in the day:

I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son’s imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite - a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture. The fact that these stories were shared through mass media with other kids and that they were some vividly embodied in the action figures meant that it was easy for children to have intersubjective fantasies, to share their play stories with each other, and to pool knowledge about the particulars of this fictional realm.

Jenkins’ thoughtful reflection made me thrillingly happy, because it’s a nostalgic reminder of the way things were for me growing up – and an important statement about how the things kids love – the video games, the action figures, the mass-mediated toys, and all the stuff we adults can’t see a value in – aren’t ever necessarily bad or good, in and of themselves. Rather what matters more is what kids do with them. I’ve become so exhausted lately of hearing about how video games and media are keeping our kids indoors and depriving them of nature. The sentiment may be well-placed indeed, but it’s aggravating to see the issue simplified, and to have a category of things demonised – especially when very few people making the statement have used or played what the kids are playing with, or understand the attraction they may hold for kids.

Nature and video games and cheap plastic toys can co-habitate our children’s lives very happily together, thank you very much, and in any case it’s never for us adults to decide what’s intrinsically valuable or worthwhile. Kids can make the most out of what adults perceive as utter crap; I know I did, as did Henry Jenkins’ son, as did every generation before. I think it’s time we start showing kids just a bit more trust when it comes to what and how they play.