Hello. It is us, your adolescent children.
At some point we will be grown adults, and we will look back on this time with amazement. We will get together on holidays and shake our heads at what a wonder it was that you, our adoring parents, remained at least partially put together through all this, especially given you had us under foot. We’ll say, “Thanks for everything mom and dad. Seriously.”
But that’s a long time from now.
Currently, we’re just a few years removed from believing that there’s a man who builds Playstation and Huffy BMX bikes in an arctic factory and then brings them to our house via the escape hatch for smoke and soot built into our fireplace. It’s been a mere 72 months (or less!) since we thought that our baby teeth were a currency for a species of fairies that happen to be loaded with quarters, dollars, or maybe even the occasional fiver. In other words, we barely know how the real world works, so you can’t just expect us to say, “We understand that we’ve had our footprint reduced from an entire school building plus recess yard to the square footage of our house only out of pure necessity. And thus we will behave accordingly, and not go absolutely crazy two hours into every workday.”
And yet, we can see the truth in a lot of situations. Our ability to do so corresponds directly with the benefit, or lack thereof, to us. We went along with the whole Santa Clause and the Tooth Fairy thing for years because we got presents and money out of it. Meanwhile, even when we were basically babies, it would take us a cool fifteen minutes to realize that new “Grime Destroyer” game was just doing the dishes, and that “Mega Number Maker” was our times tables.
In other words, if you want to give us something to distract us a bit while we’re stuck at home that will ALSO maybe teach us something useful, it’s gotta be good. Like these Juku toys. They’re just flashy and cool enough that we won’t even notice that we’re learning coding basics and creative problem solving skills. That means you pick two sets, you give them to us, they light up and do cool stuff, and you get a little work done without worrying about a weird tablet game called something like “Candy Blaster Blood Bath” melting our brains.
Will it really stick? The coding, we mean. Will that the aforementioned get-together in the future, in which we thank you for all you’ve done, occur in a villa on the Spanish coast, just a little something we bought you with the money we made selling the app we designed thanks to your thoughtful purchase from a deal site oh so many years ago? Probably not.
But then, again, you never know!
