Guest post by Melissa Clouthier of MelissaBlogs.com. On Twitter as @MelissaTweets.
Kids can’t catch a break these days:
First, there’s the Thomas the Tank Engine commie indoctrination:
If I haven’t convinced you get that Thomas the Tank Engine is evil incarnate, here’s a little gem of a plot point, especially for parents of pretty pretty princesses. In “The Sad Story of Henry,” a train who is thrilled with his pretty green paint with red stripes runs into a tunnel to hide from the rain, so it doesn’t ruin his paint. He refuses to come out, even after the rain stops, because he doesn’t want his paint to get ruined. Finally, Sir Topham Hatt (whose real name, by the way, is the Fat Controller) orders the tunnel to be bricked up with Henry still inside.
Not sadistic enough for you? Sir Topham Hatt leaves enough room at the top for Henry to see all the other engines being useful and happy, but he runs out of steam so he can’t talk to them, and the soot from the tunnel ruins his paint. And that’s how the episode ends.
I never knew. My kids have every Thomas video, book, and metal and wood engine. Doomed.
Second, if kids make it to school, they’re probably fat from sitting around watching all the Thomas videos and eating sugary breakfast cereal (more on that in a minute). Well, the petty tyrants at your kid’s elementary school will have no fatties, buster. They’re sending out mean letters:
Many schools are sending notes home to parents, telling them their children are overweight.
Lauren Schmitt, a registered dietitian, starts the school year by checking out the weight of hundreds of preschoolers in the San Fernando Valley.
“We look at growth charts and percentiles. And when a child is at 95 percent of their…we can look at weight for age or weight for height…that child would be considered obese,” she said.
By October, CBS2’s Suraya Fadel reported that parents will get what is called “healthy or unhealthy” letters. Kids call them “fat letters. [emphasis added]”
Schmitt said out of the 900 2 to 5-year-old children she looks at, roughly 200 are listed as obese.
“We let the parents know in a gentle fashion, but we also send out a ton of handouts to try to help that family,” she said.
Experts said 19 states around the country are cracking down on childhood obesity with similar letters.
Finally, there’s the sugary cereal. Did you know it ruins lives? According to Ace, it does:
“No. Kaboom was for people — children, I mean — who had decided to give up on life. And it’s a sad thing for a six year old to have already thrown in the towel and said, “Ah well. The hopes and dreams of kindergarten are ultimately exposed as so much folly. Give me the Kaboom, Ma. I’m ready to settle.”
Because that’s all such a cereal is fit for, those who settle, who accept, those who lower their gaze in defeat and shame. This, this horrid Clown Cereal that looks like it’s some kind of weird generic brand but it’s actually marketed by General Mills. I suppose this was General Mills’ attempt to tap the “downscale demographic” in six-year-olds.”
Who knew that breakfast cereal says so much? Well, it does.
The “useful” engines get Fruit Loops. The “unuseful” engines get letters from their kindergarten teacher because they’re fat from eating Kaboom cereal.
