A matter of individual taste?

Something I’m going to have to get used to is the popular culture of Peter’s generation. Not that I’m totally out of touch with what entertains infants these days, just that I’ll have to adjust to being exposed to it constantly. Take Barney, as an example. I can tolerate that for short periods at a distance. What if Peter demands Barney all the time? Teletubbies would be ok (the bright colors and simple naratives stimulate my brain), but Barney? Just the idea of that makes me think of getting rid of the TV, or at least keeping it off whenever he’s around until the age of 16. If he wants to watch Barney at 16, he can do it all he wants.

We got a Baby Einstein CD a while ago - Baby Beethoven, I believe – but we couldn’t listen to it for more than about 20 seconds. It had about 20 selections and has a run time of about 30 mintes, so each piece is about a minute long. But it sounds like it’s played on a jack-in-the-box. If I want him listening to Beethoven, I’ll just get the real thing (not the real Beethoven, he’s dead), or if I want some electronic version of Beethoven I can play the soundtrack from A Clockwork Orange for him. Well, maybe not. Still, this baby-fied stuff was crap. But what if he likes snippets of symphonies played on a jack-in-the-box? Wait a minute, wouldn’t that just encourage him to have a short attention span? Oh dear…

I’ll be fighting a losing battle in a way. I’ll want to protect him from things that freaked me out as a kid (the Wicked Witch of the West, Oompaloompas, Canadians), but he’ll probably be immune to that stuff anyway due to parental antibodies passing to him in the womb. He’ll probably wind up being freaked out by things that I wouldn’t be inclined to think are freak-out-worthy, like black and white television because it’s not HD and everyone looks gray. Come to think of it, that does sound disturbing.