A two year old boy can be one very impressive specimen of perception. More about that shortly. Let's talk about me first.

This image caught my eye on an online auction site (Trademe) and juxtaposed early '60s dayglow Commonwealth knitting patterns for conformity-suited kinderdrones with Kaiapoi. The latter being my Town of Origin (or, "hometown")

It was a reminder that this town was for a long time Wool Town Central in a nation famed for sheep and relative population comparisons of sheep to other inhabitants. Not a reminder I expected to see popping out at me from a list of $1 auctions closing soon.

Kinderdrones, I wisely recognised as a teen that it's not your fault you are lending your countenances to the propaganda against your own individuation. Photographers, directors, advertising agencies, and adults are the ones who used you for a cartoon to sell sheep fiber to your post-war parents, aunts and needle knitting nanas. There is a real girl and a real boy behind the kinderdrones and I hope they escaped alive.

Not for them, this image. No more than laundry powder or Glade air freshener is marketed to children or men. The branding on these things is toward a mother who gets to save the day from bad smells and clothing stains to the appreciation of her (usually) inept dorky husband and clean and freshly grateful children. That's what most buyers are, marketing research indicates. So that's how it's pitched in advertising. That's what sells it. And to that extent I don't look at those photographers, directors, advertising agencies as being responsible  either but rather to the consumers who eating this sHirt sandwich and then go out shopping.

Anyway, so much for one grown up's ideas about what this image evokes. Ideas I thought I got from years of philosophical contemplation and university training. What about what my son said a couple weeks shy of his third birthday? He saw this picture as I shared it with Mrs Knight N Daze and approached her at the PC, asked her to bring it back to the screen for his further contemplation. And, to paraphrase, said...

"Those kids are puppets and they talk when the TV is on and they have to wait for the ads."

She told me about that at once but it wasn't until we were both in bed nearly asleep that it came to me what he was saying. They are puppets, in just the same way I mean above. Drones, mannequins for selling clothing by adults to adults for adults. It was the next part that took longer for me to understand. At our house during a TV show I ask the kids not to talk during the show but to wait for the ad break and I've been asking this little guy to go along with that. He understands and is working hard to do that. But it must be hard to keep his expression inside waiting for his chance. My little guy was empathising with the children in this picture and using a metaphore for the situation they were in!

Just blows my mind that he saw that picture and understood all that so fast, so young. That his mind is working along these lines at all. And, then, that he insisted on seeing it more closely and telling his mother about it. And, also amazing, that he found the language skills to be able to tell us what he had recognised and evaluated.

I'm so proud of my littlest. Brilliant.

Labels: precocious