Watching and reading and playing: The Lorax Part 3

Helena's Lorax binge is slowly coming to an end, so it's about the right time to write the last of my encomia on the movie.  Today, I want to think about what this experience of repetition and (almost) obsession says about the relationship between video, books, and play.

Helena rock climbs "outside of town."

The American upper-middle class has a very moral relation to the television.  Though only some people see it as positively evil, most see it as a sort of low grade vice, something we love, but that we should watch in moderation.  A visual version of Doritos, maybe.  A couple of days ago, we bought Helena some DVDs of the PBS series "The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot about That", and the liner notes are largely dedicated to the problem of guilt.  "No need to feel bad," goes the argument.  "You put your kids in front of this, they give you a bit of a break, and they'll still be learning something."

The problem lies in the idea that if kids start to watch TV, they will never voluntarily stop.  And if you don't run and play and read and learn, the kid will turn into a couch potato.  Helena's experience of the Lorax shows something very different going on: instead of the movie being a kind of "gateway drug" to more TV, it has actually been the gate to activities American parents generally see as the sublime childhood virtues: reading, creative play, and independent storytelling.

I had read The Lorax to Helena before she started to watch the movie, but it was only after she saw the story on TV that she fell in love with the book.  She now wants me to read it daily (if not more), and has requested it in Portuguese and even in Spanish (the library had a Spanish translation; Rita had to do the Portuguese herself).  She also spends time "reading" the book alone, and has memorized so much of the text that it probably her reading probably isn't that different from mine.

Her obsession with the Lorax has also made Helena into an active storyteller. Part of our house has become a Truffula forest, and often she and I play at being brown barbaloots or singing as humming fish. When we go out on a hike or to a playground, one part of the area will be "outside of town," another part will be the Truffula forest before it was destroyed, and then there will be a place called "Thneedville."  Rocks and pinecones play the role of truffula seeds, and we go around planting them in the snow or the sand, depending on the weather.

After all of this, I am much, much less worried about Helena watching TV.  As long as we watch with her and encourage her play, it seems much more a prod to virtue than a "book tube."