I’ll be the first to admit that my kid watches way too much TV. Recently, we got Sling TV to replace cable because we were sick of dealing with the local company’s monopoly. They have all the usual channels, but sometimes extra channels pop up or are added to the packages. One of the ones added this month was an entire channel devoted to all things Ryan Kaji, of Ryan’s Mystery Playdate fame.
When my 5-year-old daughter found this channel, she was literally quivering with excitement, and now it’s all she wants to watch.
“My boyfriend has a channel all for him!”
Yeah, you heard that right.
Let me start at the beginning...
Last spring, when our schools shut down but we were still expected to teach online, Alyssa watched an even higher dose of TV so that Mommy and Daddy could do their jobs. One of her favorite shows quickly became Ryan’s Mystery Playdate or Ryan’s World on Prime Video. I didn’t understand what she liked about them, Ryan’s World in particular. It’s boring, hyperbolically obnoxious, and riddled with product placement. But if it kept her happy, and not busting in on my Zooms… let’s just say, mistakes were made.
Now that we’re back in school, I’ve limited her screen time a bit more, but it was too late. A couple of months ago, she snuck over to me and pulled my head down so she could whisper in my ear.
“Mom, I have a secret to tell you"
“Okay,” I whispered back. “Go ahead.”
“Mom… I love… Ryan.”
I thought she was kidding — until I saw her physical reaction. She was grinning like a lovestruck idiot, an expression I’d never seen her display before, and jumping up and down, clapping her hands.
“From Ryan’s Mystery Playdate?”
“Yes! I love him. I want him to come to our house. But don’t tell anyone. I’m super shy about it.”
It was literally the cutest thing ever, the way she was blushing and going on about him. My husband soon noticed and started asking her things like, “So, what do you like about Ryan? Do you think he’s handsome?” to which my daughter replied, “His hair!”
Clearly he was enjoying this idea of her having a first crush. Yet, something just wasn’t sitting right with me, and the discomfort got worse as time went on, especially when she whispered in my ear one day that “Ryan is my boyfriend!”
She asks me over and over again (literally every 2-3 days) when Ryan can come over, when she can make a video with Ryan, when she can send him a text, when she could go to his house. For a while, I wasn’t sure what to say. I kept pushing off the questions by reminding her that we couldn’t go visit anyone right now because of coronavirus. That didn’t stop her. Now she wants to know if she can go visit him when the “virus is over.”
Obviously, this isn’t going away, so why am I so uncomfortable with it?
I think I’ve drilled it down to two reasons. First, Ryan is a celebrity. There is an extremely high chance that she will never meet him. But she doesn’t understand the concept of fame and celebrity. To her, he’s just a kid who might live down the street. Maybe it has something to do with everyone having the ability to make videos and send them to each other. She can watch videos of her baby cousin, of her friends — does she think those are the same as TV shows? I don’t know how to tell her without breaking her heart that she’s probably never going to meet Ryan Kaji.
The other big issue I have is, like, how does she even know about crushes yet? She can’t possibly have those kinds of feelings yet, right? Doesn’t she need to go through puberty first? Though if I think about it, it’s very possible that she’s just mirroring behaviors she’s seen on other TV shows, or in books and movies. Miraculous! Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir is another show she enjoys, and much of the plot revolves around superheroes having crushes on each others’ alter egos.
But the way she gets when she’s talking about Ryan is really something else
I suppose it won’t be long before she’s reading Tiger Beat and taping up posters of boy bands in her room. But she’s my baby girl! I guess I thought I had more time…
