Losing Nemo, Keeping Ana. It's Harder Than You Think.

A Reflection by John Shinal

It's coming on again, the feeling that I'm from Mars and everyone else is from, well, some other place. I live a block from Berkeley, so it's not a new concept. The idea that I'm part of an extremely small and perhaps bizarre minority came from the answer to a simple question. It was posed by my wife, whose friends asked if we'd like to join them at the movies. Their two-year-old is a few months younger than ours. They were taking her to see Finding Nemo.

Ordinarily, as a journalist, I'd insert a brief description here of the latest movie produced by Pixar Animation Studios Inc. and distributed by the Walt Disney Co. But I'm so certain you know already about the story of the clown fish that I'll skip the summary and move on. If you haven't heard of the movie, I apologize for keeping you in the dark.

But you probably knew about the film weeks before it premiered, right? Perhaps, like me, you first learned of Nemo from the ubiquitous freeway billboards. It's hard to miss that big grey shark or not root for that tiny orange protagonist, especially when you're stuck in traffic behind a big trailer. Maybe Nemo's debut for you came when he and his pals were placed between the sandwich and fries of a McDonald's Happy Meal, bought by the mom in line in front of you on the orders from her screaming first-grader. Or maybe you heard the radio spots or read one of the reviews in a newspaper or on the Internet. Tough to miss.

I had done the latter, so I knew what sort of movie our friends were inviting us to: an innocuous and cute story with endearing characters and a happy ending. I've seen other Pixar movies and I liked them. They are very funny, and I believe in laughter as a tonic for the world.

Yet the answer to our friends' question was no. My wife and I had decided over a year ago, from the time our daughter could climb up onto the couch, that we would shield her from the mass media as much as we could for as long as we could. Although there are many stories linking television viewing to aggressive behavior in kids, we didn't need to read any. We see it with our own eyes all the time. In a phrase, it's about over-stimulation.

Even videos as innocuous as Winnie-the-Pooh can induce a state in her that we call "spazzing out," as in, Ana is spazzing out after watching that video. After viewing it long enough, she throws herself around the house like the Tasmanian devil on a bad day. She won't sit still to eat or doesn't want to go to bed.

I'm sure some of you are right now thinking, "she's two, for God's sake, of course she acts like that." But the truth is, she usually doesn't. She spends most of her time reading books and playing games in her room. She'll even sit still long enough to do puzzles. Our friends don't believe it and I'm sure hate us for it.

However, if we spend a week at either of Ana's grandparents' houses, where the TV is constantly on, it takes weeks of deprogramming to get her reading again on her own. The more TV she watches, the shorter her attention span becomes.

That's not to say that we don't have exceptions. Due either to laziness (mostly on my part) or sympathy (on my wife's), we have on a few occasions relaxed the rules. Once in a while, I'll let her sit next to me when I watch The Simpsons or Seinfeld reruns, or the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, which has been the extent of my television viewing habit for years now. My wife has let her watch Winnie-the-Pooh, or Kipper the Dog, or Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit animated cartoons when she's sick. They make her feel better.

Still, we're trying to hold back the tide of television and movies from our daughter's life. Why? Because the time window I have to be the biggest influence in her life will close faster than I'll believe. My older siblings with a combined ten children have told me this, so I believe it. I want to make the most of the time I have before she starts saying sarcastic things to me like yeah, right dad, while rolling her eyes.

In a few short years, the opinions of her friends and classmates will mean a lot more to her than mine will. It makes sense: they look a lot more like her than I do. When they sit on the swings at the local playground, their feet don't hit the ground. Mine do. I see the influence already. We told her many times that she would probably like going to the potty better than wearing a diaper (less messy for everyone, obviously). We were making limited progress on that front when we went to visit friends who had two girls aged four and six. You can bet they used the potty, and Ana started saying that she wanted to also.

The last reason for screening our daughter from the mass media is the most important, I think: the persuasive power of advertising. U.S. company executives spend tens of billions of dollars every year to put the names of their products and services in front of our eyes and inside our ears. They're not stupid people. Advertising is the grease of the wheels of commerce. It works.

Although marketing budgets are closely-kept secrets, it's a safe bet to assume Disney spent well in excess of $10 million to market Finding Nemo; probably more like tens of millions. If they did, it was well-spent. The film grossed more than $143 million in its first two weeks. I've seen other Pixar movies. I've seen both Toy Story movies more than once. I like them, as do a lot of other people. I'm sure Nemo would have been fine financially without the advertising and marketing tie-in blitz. But those studio marketing people weren't taking any chances.

The day I made the decision that we wouldn't be Finding Nemo was the day I picked up my box of breakfast cereal and saw the fish, next to a recipe for how I could make Undersea Crispix Mix." Even morning cereal time is no longer sacred. "Who's that, Daddy," Ana asked, looking at Nemo. Just some fish, I said.

I want my daughter to like things - be they books or movies or TV shows or people or animated fish - because she genuinely likes them, not because she's bombarded with so many messages that she can't resist them. Until she can do that on her own (in about, say, six months), I'm doing it for her.

John Shinal is a veteran journalist who has written for Outside Magazine, Bloomberg News and Business Week. He is currently writing a novel about the tech boom in Silicon Valley. You can reach John at john_shinal@yahoo.com