Happy slappy
Friday, January 19th, 2007
I HAVE just come back from taking the children to Disney in Paris for a couple of days.
Disney is one of very few holidays which suits teenage girls and a five-year-old boy: a long-promised treat, paid for mostly with three years’ worth of Tesco vouchers.
And we enjoyed it. It was all very Disney. No rubbish on the sidewalks. No chips in the paintwork. Everything just perfect and ticketyboo.
I had been to Disney in Florida for a day, but that was exactly 25 years ago, on my 21st birthday.
And the spooky thing was that despite the quarter century time gap, and the fact we were on a different continent, the only obvious difference appeared to be in the weather.
But there were subtler differences which gradually peeped out behind the Disney façade now and again.
Let’s take the slapping incidents, for example.
When we got back from France we were driving home and heard a news report about a Disney cast member who had been suspended for allegedly slapping a teenage boy.
A father, who has video to back up his claims, says a Disney Tigger character punched or slapped his son around the ears. It seems that bouncy old Tigger could soon be bounced right out of his job.
I don’t know which of the Disney theme parks this occurred at, but the children and I instantly decided it must have been Paris.
This was, firstly, because we had just seen an excessively-bouncy Tigger over-acting his part with far too much energy that very weekend. For some reason his Tigger suit was a lurid, acid Orange colour.
And this particular Tigger got into character up to the point where he was bouncing madly on and off fences and on to off-limits stretches of perfectly-manicured grass. To be honest, the children around him looked slightly worried.
The girls and I decided he might have taken something, or been affected by the toxic colour of his costume.
But the second reason we suspected the slapping might have happened in France was because of the very different style of parenting we witnessed.
We were in the queue for, I think, Space Mountain 2 when there was a slight altercation behind us and a teenage French girl attempted to push by us.
As an aside here, we had already begun to notice that French young people just don’t get queueing. They seem to see it as a mark of weakness to get in line. Even though the queues were perfectly clearly marked, they just ran past in groups whenever the slightest gap appeared.
Maybe it was just the young Parisian city-dwellers, and perhaps teenagers brought up in London, New York and Rome all have to develop similar dog-eat-dog survival techniques.
But when this particular girl tried to push by me, I decided that perhaps I should just shuffle slightly to one side, blocking her path. Childish, I know, but like all well brought-up Brits, I see queue jumping as the ultimate in bad manners.
I was then aware of some quiet French conversation behind me, but my 30-year-old grade C French O-level certificate was no real help here.
I turned around just in time to see an extremely chic and smartly-dressed woman of about my age violently slapping a stocky 13 or 14-year-old boy across the face. Hard.
The boy, also dressed in expensive city-smart clothes, was I presumed, her son.
He did not make a sound. He just stared blankly at the floor ahead of him and carried on shuffling quietly forward with the rest of the line.
I was shocked. It was an enormous culture difference.
I was worried that I had somehow caused some family disagreement by drawing attention to the queue jumper.
I realised that in England, parents have now accepted as a norm that it is not acceptable to use physical violence to chastise a child openly. (I’m not saying it doesn’t still happen behind closed doors, but very rarely in public).
And what shocked me even more was the way the boy wordlessly accepted this punishment.
Can you imagine how a teenage boy in this country would react? I would expect a loud war or words, threats to ring Childline, and the possibility that the boy might strike back.
It was not the only time that I witnessed parents being far more strict and controlling than we ever see in this country. Even in the family fun atmosphere of Disney, children were not allowed to step out of line.
OK, it’s nice to see children being well-behaved. But it made me wonder how often that kind of violence and public humiliation were used to gain good behaviour.
What made it worse was that even though I disagree totally with smacking children, neither I nor anybody else in the queue raised so much as an eyebrow to intervene on the boy’s behalf.
That was partly down to my personal cowardice, partly the language barrier and partly a feeling that somehow, in France, this was perfectly acceptable parenting.
In contrast, when we went to have a character breakfast with Mickey Mouse and co, the cast of Disney’s Robin Hood were touring the tables, including the evil Sheriff of Nottingham.
Now my five-year-old had no idea that this 6ft man in a lion’s outfit was supposed to be the evil Sheriff. As far as he’s concerned, as a big fan of the recent BBC Saturday tea-time series, the Sheriff is supposed to look more like Lily Allen’s dad, Keith.
And so my little lad was quite perturbed when he was suddenly practically picked up off the floor by the scruff of his neck by a giant stuffed lion, to pose for an in-character photograph.
There was no fuss. He bravely smiled for his picture, but quietly pulled me aside afterwards to ask in a worried voice why a lovable Disney character is grabbing him by the collar.
I explained it was just play-acting, the lion was supposed to be the baddie, and he was doing the same as a joke with all the children.
He accepted my explanation, but I could see that he was slightly upset at being man-handled in this way by an adult stranger.
Which made me wonder about how easily the Tigger incident could have been misconstrued, because of subtle differences in culture, language, acceptable children’s behaviour and sense of humour.
On the surface everything at Disney looks the same, but scratch the surface and you start to wonder if it is such a small world after all?
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