If you could pick the one core asset of humans that has led to our success, I think a strong case would be made for our ability to utter an audible rendition of our inner thoughts.
Language.
When you talk to anyone, you are only able to make a rough approximation of what you really mean. It is difficult to imagine that you can adequately and convincingly speak something that is exactly the same thing as what you think. For adults, there are decades of personal and social information that go into every single word that is spoken. Obviously, the process does not end until we die, but the impact of each moment on your underlying assumptions probably declines over time.
Adding a cup of water to a forty gallon tank does not have the same impact as adding that cup to a 2 gallon tank. It's like an adult is sipping water slowly, choosing when to drink. Children are standing with their ears open while a constantly running fire hose of linguistic complexity is running at high pressure.
My primary goal here is to discuss the impact of corporate language on the process of raising children.
How do you talk about things going on in the world when a great chunk of the words and ideas that kids hear are created, presented, and controlled by a corporate culture that has only profit in mind?
It's wildly impractical to think that one could remove the child from the public square. It simply doesn't work that way. A child will be part of a variety of communities. It's just not practical to think that it would work.
Kleenex.
How many of you use the word, 'Kleenex' when you might mean 'tissue?'
In Germany, the brand name that has overtaken the generic is 'Tempo.'
In Texas, a soda pop was generically referred to as a 'Coke.' The conversation was roughly like this:
"I'll have a Coke."
"What kind of Coke?"
"7-Up."
I tried to talk with my children in a generic manner. I tried, and still try!, to talk to them in a way that is not favoring the product name over the thing itself. As a stay at home dad, my kids have each had their chance to be my sidekick during my daily errands. I have been conscious of the names I call the places we go, and the things we purchase.
When we would go to Costco to buy some unnecessarily huge amount of cheese sticks, I would describe it as 'the O store." It had a nice ring to it. One of the Trader Joe's near us has a stuffed monkey hidden in the store. When a kid finds the monkey, they get a treat. We call Trader Joe's, 'The Monkey Store.' My daughter described a store for me one day called 'The Mountain Store.' I had no idea what she was talking about. I realized that she had, in her 3 or 4 year old mind, made a connection from a book we have about a girl who lives in the mountains. The style of construction of the big mountain building was similar to the Fred Meyer store.
In our world, there are grocery stores, hardware stores, tissues... I try my best to avoid giving the products free shelf space in our home. We avoid concerns over brand name clothing. With a 14 year old who is interested in sports, that is difficult to do. I don't want to disrupt his social world, and large corporations make shoes for sports.
Commercial television is a pain in the ass. Video on demand can be even worse. At least with commercial television, you can switch channels. When you watch something on demand, the fast forward function is frequently disabled.
The other day she told me something about Justin Bieber. Let's say he has a little talent. Okay. That is really secondary to his position in the marketplace as a product. I panicked! No!!!!! Please, no!!!!
I said, in all seriousness, "Sweetie, we like music because it's good music. Not because someone looks nice when they play it." This is really a repurposing of her own word she developed to describe someone who is physically attractive. She will often need to further clarify what she means when she says 'nice.' Sometimes she means that the person is a nice person, other times she means that there is something about the look of the person that is interesting or compelling.
The hard part about corporate culture is that mainstream popular culture is a product. Most of the culture that kids encounter as they weave their way through childhood is the sort of culture that is commodified to one degree or another. How to reduce the corporate impact while not disabling the kid's ability to navigate the complex world? This is an incredible balancing act. It may seem like a great thing for an adult to drop out of the mainstream popular corporate culture, but it is not just impractical to remove kids, it's probably going to have some impacts on their social situation at some point.
At some point, some of the popular culture we have in front of us is going to be the cultural representation of this moment in our history. In that respect, popular culture is 'culture.'
What things have I absolutely given up on?
ipod
I told her before kindergarten that if she wanted an ipod, she would need to know how to read. She would have to read me a chapter book before she could get one. She was able to accomplish that, but now I have the remnant of corporate wording in our house, and I can't do anything about it- 'personal music player' was a bit complex for her. She didn't understand the difference between language that was corporate and language that was from the broader culture. It's just like the kleenex.
I could go into religious language, and how difficult it is to understand the world without being versed to some extent in the general beliefs of the world's religions.
In my opinion, religious institutions have the same interest as larger capitalist/corporate institutions. Religion benefits when the language of the broader culture is filled with words that carry the religious institution's underlying ideas.
How do I describe a simple story like the first jack-o-lantern to a child without explaining the concept of heaven and hell? How can I do that without explaining the concept of the soul? How do I do that without explaining the underlying ideal that actions are judged by some moral scale that is the result of some ultimate power?
If I don't explain those things independently of the story, then it is necessary for the child to imagine a world in which those things are somehow real. Otherwise, why would we talk about them to somehow motivate good behavior from our children? That's confusing to a kid.
So that poor child has to listen to a long and boring set of premises, clarifications, and prebuttals before I can tell a story.
Sometimes I feel like I'm euphemizing them to the point of distraction.