Comfort Videos

Those of you with pre-school kids probably know this phenomenon quite well:

“Okay Mikey, what do ya wanna watch?”
“Shrek II!”
“But we just watched Shrek II.”
“Shrek II”
“Come on Mikey, we have dozens of other videos that we can watch…”
“Shrek II”
“But…”
“Shrek II”

And so you and your four-year old spend the afternoon watching Shrek II for the fourth time that afternoon. What’s up with that? Why are young kids that way?

Clearly it isn’t a “logical” thing, and I certainly do not assume to have some deeper understanding as to why little ones want to continually watch the same videos (of equal interest is the phenomenon discovered by an enterprising video producer that one can “entertain” pre-schoolers for hours with videos that follow the big machinery around in construction sites… no dialogue, no plot, just a camera following the bulldozers or cranes, but that’s another story). Anyway, recently I noticed that I was also demonstrating this propensity to viewing the same video over and over again (though not usually repeatedly during a single afternoon, but that was probably more a “time” thing than anything else).

This is not exactly a new phenomenon with me. Way back when (10-years ago), while living with a girlfriend, I used to throw in the same video tape when I did laundry (she did the kitchen and bathroom, I got laundry duty… I think I got the better deal). I had recorded the PBS series The Astronomers and for whatever reason I continually played the tapes when I needed something interesting on the tube while I folded laundry. I didn’t play this tape every week, but I did it often enough that it stuck in my memory.

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