They are three, all filmed as faux home video shoots. One is of a mother brining a birthday cake into a pool party and discovering a drowned child. Another is of a father who is bathing a child, is called away to the phone, and the child drowns (why the mother holding the video camera doesn’t stick around to watch the child, I’ll never know), and the third is of a woman being awakened from dozing on the couch with her babe in arms and discovering that the baby isn’t breathing.
Never sleep with an infant, even for a moment, because a moment is all it takes.."
Now, the point of this post is not to get into co-sleeping wars, but that culminating statement is really just a lie – You doze off for a moment, and the baby is suffocated? Really? Maybe if you’re obese and drunk and/or medicated, but really.
So, you can fight about co-sleeping if you will (formerly known as the "family bed" – I’m not an ideologue about it at all and am wary, to say the least of making a political/and/or cultural statement about it, but I will say that this thing I have always done – not because I want to but because it just makes more sense, and honestly, my babies always slept better in the early months when they were with me, and thank you very much, Michael Jacob sleeps all alone in his crib for eleven hours at a stretch now, so no crippling of the psyche there.) …but the hot issue here is the commercials themselves. They’re rather shocking, even after you’ve seen them a couple of times. They’re playing all the time – if you watch the early evening news, you’ll see at least one.
I’m not against shocking or startling images, especially if we need to be shocked into awareness. But I’m not sure about these. As usual, I don’t know how to articulate it, but I think it has something to do with the fact that they’re fake. No, I’m not saying, show me a real video of the discovery of a drowned child. I’m saying, there’s an element of manipulation here that I think people resent.
But…maybe it will save a child’s life? I don’t know, because I think people dumb enough to leave a little child unattended in a bathtub aren’t too easily taught, anyway.
Opinions?
Update:
Someone in the comments boxes compares them to the Volkswagon commercial where the guys are talking and then BAM – they crash. Good call.
Update: Speaking of faux-realistic ads that feature trauma to children, go to this page and watch the last ad on the page – for Mercy Children’s Hospital in Toledo. Wait for the last line of the ad. Crass? Tacky? Produced in a drug-induced brain lapse? How would you describe it? (Hat tip Kevin!)
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