With the MasterChef juggernaut about to serve up its latest side dish in the form of Junior MasterChef, the kitchen timer is already trilling with the first claim of exploitation of its young contestants.
Last night the nation’s most lucrative TV brand shortened the apron strings and lowered the bench heights as a bunch of eight to 12-year-olds battled it out to become the most precocious kid …. oops, I mean, the most talented tween chef in Australia.
But not everyone is happy about combining kids with reality TV and it’s not because they’ll be staying up past their bedtimes.
“All but one [of these kids] will ultimately fail,” says Dr Guy Redden, of the department of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney.
“Adults living in a capitalist society are familiar with high-stakes, winner-takes-all competition and are better placed to deal it,” he says. “I’d question whether most adults would feel comfortable watching kids on such an emotional roller-coaster.”
He’s right. Parents will be petrified, or at least bemused, because seeing a child fail these days is as rare as chancing upon a truffle growing in your back yard.
In our age of pass the parcel prizes for everyone and medals dished out simply for participation, there’s no distinction between winners and losers. So concerned are we with little Genevieve’s self esteem that we champion even the most minimal of effort. “Oh darling, I’m so proud of you,” we squeal when they draw something they claim to be a person. “Oh sweetheart, you were so close,” we console when they kick a ball five metres to the left of the goal.
The sight then of a 10-year-old being dismissed from the MasterChef kitchen after failing to temper chocolate is something akin to seal clubbing. Whether or not these kids have to hold it together until they get into the chauffeured car or can run sobbing to their parents remains to be seen but either way it’s going to be tough.
And that’s the point. Life is tough and there’s nothing like a bit of failure to build resilience.
In her address to Harvard graduates author JK Rowling pointed out that without her personal shortcomings she might never have become a squillionaire and we would never have known the joy of Harry Potter.
While acknowledging that their presence at the ceremony suggested they were not well-acquainted with failure, she implored the Harvard elite to embrace failure, perhaps even seek it out.
Citing a divorce, poverty and joblessness as evidence of her own failure, she explained how hitting rock bottom allowed her to rebuild her life on a solid foundation.
“Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.”
Yet in our modern quest to discover our children’s talents virtually before they have shed their nappies, there is no room for failure. We praise them in anything and everything they do so they are unable to distinguish not only what they are genuinely good at but what makes them truly happy.
For a couple of years I drove (in both senses of the word) my daughter to swimming lessons after her coach told me she had potential. Even I could see she had the right body shape, the killer instinct, the chemistry between muscle and water. Eventually, aged nine, she articulated what I had failed to see: “Just because I’m good at it Mum doesn’t mean that it isn’t really really boring.”
A few years back you were barely out of the labour ward before some child expert was telling you that the key to successful parenting was plenty of praise and ignore the bad behaviour. Now we’re encouraged to get our kids to evaluate their own achievements and failures, to appraise not just for effort but for enjoyment. Instead of telling them they were a fabulous angel in the pre-school nativity play, you might ask them what it was like to be on stage. How did the costume feel? Is it something they’d like to do again?
Recently, rather than cheering every time my daughter scored a hoop in basketball I asked her what it felt like: “I love that moment when I don’t know if it’s going to go in or out,” she told me. “Then when it plops through I feel like a super hero.”
Kids could get quite comfortable with failure – perhaps even learn from it – if only we let them. At Eton College in England, the country’s most esteemed boys’ school and the alma mater of no less than 19 British Prime Ministers, there is no prompt sitting in the wings as the boys perform their annual school play. If they forget their lines … well, they forget their lines. Apparently it rarely happens.
So back at MasterChef central I hope there will be crying over spilt milk and sobs over sunken souffles. Even better if there is a tantrum or two. Surely it’s time someone dropped a plate on the way to the judges table.
No matter, the lovely George Calombaris will be there with his usual homecooked homilies. “Let me tell you something,” he tells the assorted tweens during one challenge. “To become a great chef or do anything in life, you just have to try your hardest. That’s all.”
Try telling that to the kid blubbing in the back of the car because he lost.
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