Menu
header photo

Project Vision 21

Transforming lives, renewing minds, cocreating the future

Blog Search

Blog Archive

Comments

There are currently no blog comments.

“I want chocolate and I want it now!”

Francisco Miraval

“I want chocolate and I want it now!” the little girl said to her parents. And she said it with such clarity that those of us in the supermarket looked at the girl and her family with a mix of amazement, anxiety, and expectation.

I don’t know how old the little girl was. I can tell you she was old enough to properly pronounce each word and young enough (and small enough) to seat comfortably inside the supermarket cart.

As if trying to make her message both clear and unforgettable, the girl repeated her request in rapid succession and with increasing volume: “I want chocolate and I want it now!” To dispel any doubts, she pointed her finger to the milk refrigerator, specifically to chocolate milk.

Probably after being conditioned for several year to blindly obey their daughter, the parents of the girl immediately moved the cart close to the chocolate milk. The mother opened the door of the store refrigerator and she was about to get half a gallon of chocolate milk when the girl said something I did not expect. (Upon reflection, I realized I should have expected it.)

Right at the moment when her mother was about to get the milk, the girl said, “I don’t want chocolate anymore! Now I want candy!” Moved like puppets controlled by invisible yet very real strings, the parents immediately moved away from the dairy products and went to the aisle where candy is sold.

The whole incident lasted less than two minutes. After that, I didn’t see the little girl again. Only God knows how many more times before and after I saw her she repeated a similar scene with her parents, just changing the object of her request.

I want to be clear that I am not disapproving the attitude of the parents or judging the behavior of the little girl. Two minutes in the life of a family may be useful to develop a picture, but not enough to judge anybody. However, I wonder what would happen if more children become equally successful in manipulating their parents during their childhood and even beyond.

If this little girl, just a few years old, is already so demanding regarding her requests, what is she going to demand in 10 or 15 years and what will be the reaction of her parents?

But there is another element, even more alarming and almost terrifying, to add to this scenario. What if this extremely demanding children are also extremely intelligent? This is not a crazy question. In the last two months, two girls, Lydia Sebastian and Nicole Barr, both of them 12 and both of them from England, were found to have IQs higher than Einstein and Hawking.

What kind of future awaits us with highly manipulative children with an IQ higher than the IQ of two of the greatest geniuses of our time? Such a future is unimaginable for us, but I am almost certain they (the little geniuses) already imagined it.

Go Back