The Monster Children

A friend of mine told me this story several years ago and it’s a true one. He said he bought a baby rabbit one spring and built a hutch for it out behind his house. At first, when the rabbit was little and cute, he spent a lot time watching it, but after a while he would just toss the lettuce and carrots in the cage without really looking. One day, in the fall, a visitor caught sight of the rabbit and screamed, so for the first time in months, my friend came to look. The animal’s two front teeth had grown into fangs, and curved out of its mouth like elephant tusks, to the point where they had begun to cut into the rabbit’s own neck.

I still have dreams about that rabbit, and they’re more frightening than any my mind can construct about tigers or snakes. You expect those animals to be sinister and threatening, after all. No villain is more frightening than the one you had supposed to be your friend.

I saw a new movie last week in which a man tires to stab a 5-year-old boy to death and when he raised his knife over the boy’s throat, the audience cheered. This movie had to do with demonic possession, and once again the devil was personified by a child.

The idea of a parent killing a child is not new. In fairy tales and legends, and even in the Bible, there are stepmothers who send children out into the woods, fathers who lead sons to mountaintops to sacrifice them. What has changed is that parental violence no longer seems to be a source of guilt and shame – and its objects are no longer depicted as innocents.

Parents who stood, proud and hopeful, at the hospital windows twenty years ago, making plans for sleeping, soft-skinned infants, could hardly have bargained for Quaaludes and David Bowie¹ for daughters and sons who would live inside stereo headphones or sit, silent, at the dinner table, opening their mouths only to eat, or to say: “Do you know how much I hate you?”

What has happened to the children – not to all of them, but to large number – must seem, to their parents, almost like the fairy tales where elves steal the real, good infant and substitute a changeling. I suppose the parents of these changeling children must be frightened, to be harboring strangers – enemies, almost – under their roofs, feeding them, putting the sequined T shirts on their backs, and receiving not the gratitude or respect they gave their parents but condescension and contempt and maybe pity. Sometimes the children do not even seem quite human: it’s difficult to picture the toughest, coolest ones crying, hard to believe they were ever babies.

The result of this is a growing anti-child sentiment that makes me sad. I read in woman’s magazine the results of a poll in which 10,000 mothers were asked whether they would again choose to have children. Seventy per cent said they would not. Newspapers play up stories of youth gangs and violence while the public clamors for a “tighter rein”. Even the children we choose as our movie and television stars are appealing, almost, for their very sinisterness.

A lot of parents now even seem to be turning on their own children. My mother tells me that when she goes to a party there is always talk of the children – but something has changed. Once the parents used to boast. Now they commiserate and exchange examples of their own sons’ and daughters’ awfulness. There was the case of the father who shot and killed his “uncontrollable” son, was tried for the crime and set free.

That’s the large and frightening question troubling the parents who view their children as monstrous strangers. And what is so appealing, I think, about these demonic-possession movies is that they suggest some spontaneously generated, innate evil in the children, something completely out of the parents’ control. Fault lies with the Devil, or the drugs, or the music, or the false guru, or what is referred to as “the world we live in” and not with the parents themselves.

No doubt there are good and loving and conscientious people among the parents of the “bad” children, and that no parent should take full blame for what his child does. But the notion that a parent has no control over determining the kind of person his child will be seems to me dangerous. It lets parents off the hook too easily.

If children are worse now than they used to be, it isn’t that parents are necessarily more inept than earlier generations were. But if they’ve done something wrong they are lees likely to get away with it than they once were, in the days when children’s demons, though no less present were less visible.

The reasons why a child “goes bad” are complicated, for sure. But when there is a monster child, who appears determined to be as uncute, as unlovable as possible, and his parents turn on him, I wonder if that suggests something about the quality of their love. It doesn’t seem far, really, from the quality of feeling evidenced by the purchasers of baby rabbits who stop visiting the hutch after the animal outgrows the Easter basket. No wonder the fangs begin to sprout.

Answer the following questions on the text.

1. What is the main idea of the article?

2. How accurate is the title of the article with respect to the content of this essay?

3. How does the comparison with a baby rabbit relate to the author’s thesis?

4. What evidence does the author provide to show that now children are worse than they used to be?

5. Where does the fault for monstrous children lie?

6. Does the author feel the parents should bear full responsibility for what their children do?

7. How does the author account for a growing antichild sentiment of parents?

E. Video Comprehension and Discussion Guide:

Watch the video program. Make use of the following guide to

a) avoid comprehension problems;

b) assist you with further discussion in class.