When Barney is big news

By Uriah A. Kiser

Published: April 23, 2008

Turning points seem ubiquitous when you’re a parent. There are developmental milestones for your child, periods of time when you have to learn new skills and lots of situations that force you to think on your feet. Then there’s the precise moment when you realize that an imaginary, purple dinosaur has become a large part of your life.

Yep, if it hadn’t hit you before, you know you’re really a parent when you delight in the fact that an episode of “Barney & Friends” contains several classic segments. (Conversely, you know you really have a drug problem if you read that bit above about a purple dinosaur and thought I meant a REAL purple dinosaur and not the one on PBS.)

Though I’m a notorious TV addict, my wife and I decided early on that the tube would not be our son’s babysitter. So Jackson hardly watches anything, and, consequently, he’s not dumbstruck by the TV like some kids are.

But after Jackson enjoyed watching a “Barney” video someone gave us, we decided it was OK if he became a regular viewer of this one program. And, because we had just gotten a digital video recorder from the cable company, we set the machine to record every episode.

Now, since Barney wasn’t around when I was young, I knew nothing of his show other than it was popular with the tyke set but reviled by others. I had heard the stories of Barney parodies, and sure enough, if you Google just “Barney,” you immediately get an image of a violent satire of the character.

So I wasn’t worried so much that this TV-watching would ruin Jackson as I was that it would be terribly annoying to the adults in the home.
The show is actually harmless at worst and educational at best, which is good, seeing as how because it’s on public television it’s brought to you partially by your tax dollars.

Also, any fears we had of a daily half-hour of squawk box transforming our child into a drooling nincompoop have subsided. Jackson likes to hear the opening theme song, and then he looks at, oh, maybe five minutes of the broadcast in between dragging his stuffed doggie or other toys around the house.
I’m afraid it’s really my wife and I who absorb the most from the show. We had a several-minutes-long discussion the other day about the show’s wardrobe choices.

For example, Barney doesn’t wear shoes while his fellow imaginary dinosaur buddies do.

Likewise, I seriously lamented the fact that while Barney looks like he would have been the kind of dinosaur to walk on two legs, the one female dino on the show seems like she really ought to be presented as getting around on four.

Guess it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that I was way too excited to learn that packed into one episode were three key elements: a) the introduction of the character Riff, a small, orange, musically inclined dino; b) Jackson’s favorite Barney version of the “Old MacDonald” song; and c) a puppet show.
Without considering the real meaning of my words, I blurted out something like, “All this in one episode? We should really save this one.”
What had I become?

To make matters worse, last week my wife asked me a plotline question about Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer” series - and Jackson doesn’t even watch that regularly.

Yes, as former full-time newspaper reporters on the watch for corruption in local government, we now find ourselves asking hard questions these days such as: Is Diego, title character of the series “Go, Diego, Go!” Dora’s brother, or what?

The answer: Diego is Dora’s cousin, as well as an “8-year-old action-adventure hero who loves nature and animals,” according to his Web site.

Obviously. And the sad truth that it makes perfect sense to me pretty much renders me a 31-year-old who is slowly losing his grip on the grown-up world.

Fredericksburg resident Jonathan Hunley is a columnist for Media General’s Stafford County Sun, and father to a nearly 2-year-old son.