I love watching funny baby videos on youtube. There are few things more refreshing than to find a new video every now and then of babies laughing relentlessly, or cringing at the taste of their first lemon or pickle, or just being plain clumsy. No matter how sad or tired or grumpy I may be, this video never fails to make me laugh. And let me add that I have seen it perhaps fifty times, and this baby's laugh is still contagious to me.
I will, however, not deny that I do feel voyeuristic everytime I run a youtube search for 'funny baby videos.' So today, while indulging my voyeuristic cravings, I found a playlist of baby videos, of one particular baby, with the voice of one woman in all the videos. Eventually I found out that the woman was the baby's mother. As I watched a few of the videos she had put on, my thought process progressed from the omnipresent pride that parents take in every single breath that their child takes, to the narcissism of this woman to think that her child is so important that she thought it reasonable to document every living second of her life... but what stuck with me was the realization that these parents who invest so much time and energy in creating video blogs of their children are exhibiting by proxy, with heavy costs.
This video, in particular, made me kind of mad at the mother. Before I begin my rant on it, let me just say that I did not have the patience to sit through the entire video. My unchecked, emotional response to this is, 'really, give the kid some food.' My intellectual response to this is... are we breeding pathology here? Perhaps forty seconds into the video, I had an urge to tell the mom to put the camera away and create some real bond with the kid(s). The camera seemed like a tool of distancing herself from her child, as opposed to validating the child's existence. Children are not sophisticated enough in their thought to be able to appreciate the apparent validation one gets from being videotaped. So in the child's psychological reality, the message the mother gives leads to a sense of confusion. The mother hears the child, but does not really listen to her. The mother sees that the child is hungry, but does nothing to fulfil that need.
I wonder then, how would this emotional and physical distancing, disguised as involvement and validation, impact the psychological growth of a child? It almost seems like a cosmopolitan rendition of uninvolved parenting. Basic needs of the child are fulfilled, but any time spent with the child beyond that is really a narcissistic feeding to self. 'Let me keep my kid at arm's length, and video tape her while she begs for food, so that I can show off to the world what I have created.' I wonder how the kids of the youtube generation will be in their adolescence. Will the exhibitionism get internalized? Or will they act out by taking on to schizoid mannerisms? Will their sense of agency develop given that they perhaps feel no sense of control over the ambivalent involvement of their parents? Or will they learn to manipulate others in order to get some attention? This could manifest in many ways, but whichever way it does, I find it hard to concieve that these children will develop healthy attachment and relational patterns when they reach adulthood. But then perhaps, that will be the new face of normalcy.
I understand that parents want to preserve memories of their precious children, and that these parents who are video-bloggers are, in fact well-intentioned. However, perhaps in dousing their children with all this sugar and honey, they are inadvertently making them diabetic.
