Children in Chain Mail

Taking the Sting and Mush Out of Sick Kid and other childhood Chain Mail

Ever notice how children in chain letter stories

1. Are actually angels
2. Are dying
3. Have lost or are about to lose a loved one, mother, father, brother or sister or pet
4. Are treated badly, are poor and/or disabled, or treated badly because they are poor and/or disabled

5. Are supposed to be pitied, admired, and treated so much better than oneself or any other able-bodied, middle-class person, simply because they are disabled, poor, sad, angelic, and probably reveal at the end of the story they have a dying family member or pet they've just tried to save by selling all their ragged clothes and worn out shoes, and since that didn't work, they now want to save their loved one by passing on chain mail.

6. Always wiser and more virtuous than all the greedy busy blundering blockheaded adults around them combined
7. Always saying things that tend to get adults in the heart or outwit and outwise them
8. Always in the right when the adults are always in the wrong. Usually one adult, the main first person narator of the chain letter, is often humbled by the profound sayings or nature of a chain letter child, or gets to be some kind of hero and display a bit of altruism which results in him or her being praised and somehow rewarded when the child bestows his/her love on the rare kind adult
9. Never crying without a good reason
10. Never to be shushed or encouraged to use a little self-control
11. Are there as a reminder to adults that life, like childhood is short and shouldn't be wasted on daily life things...Work, chores, or anything else that might tear the parent away from the child for two seconds lest the child feels neglected
12. Too unbelievably brave and religious when faced with something like death, for instance
13. Children laugh and smile more and are just happier than adults
14. Childhood is always thought of as idillic, better than life as an adult

Let's put a little reality into the picture and ultimately weaken the sap-packed painful punches many of these child chains are designed to inflict.

One story fwd I got from a forwarder told of this little girl who was sitting in a public place, all alone, and ignored by all the seemingly too-busy, self-absorbed, even snobby adults.

This kid was poor, dressed in rags, the whole bit. But along comes our story hero, from whose point of view the chain letter is written.

She notices and takes pity on the poor girl, and when she does, the rags and old shoes and worn out hat vanish, to be replaced by a halo and glowy bright wings and gown or pink dress. Yes, the little girl is an angel. She is the guardian angel of the chain letter hero. And, she could only be seen by her hero.

And the point of this story is what? Especially since no one else saw the kid/angel, no wonder everybody seemed to be ignoring her. How could they possibly help it? Duh! And what of our hero? Is he or she being stalked, or just delusional? Perhaps he or she is so lonely she/he has to make up stories about heroics and angels as a substitute for company? Maybe he/she drove all other potential friends away with such crazy stories? Who knows, but the chain mail fails to impress any reader with their thinking-cap on and in working order.

Another one told of a busy mother who for whatever reason had to *gasp* leave her youngest child's side for several seconds to I dunno, go shopping or do some housework, something. She left him in the care of an older brother or sister, and one of the rules was that the children were to behave and not write on the walls, or was it the curtains? Anyway...The littlest child did write on the wall, and the older sibling warned he was going to catch it for that, and promptly told Mommy as soon as she came back. "Little Jimmy just drawed on da walls in da basement! Nyah nyah!" sort of thing, you know.

That did it, Mommy blew her top. She found the hapless little youngest kid and went up one side of him and down the other, yelling some tirade about how bad it was to write on the walls, and what a very very bad boy he was for writing on the walls and ruining her life by being so bad by writing on the walls etc. yadda yadda yadda.

Only after the kid was sent to his room in tears did Mommy go look at the evidence. Sure enough, the little kid had written on the wall. What, exactly had he written?

"I LOVE YOU MOMMY"

Mommy, overcome by guilt and shame and all things wonderful and nice, went running to her youngest kid's room to hug, apologize and cry, which she did profusely. And I guess from then on, this particular little family lived happily ever after and knew everything about how to live life.

--*BZZZZZZZT*-- Cut cut cut!!!

First of all, what parent doesn't check out a snitch to be sure it's true before going ballistic? Imagine what a hayday the kids would have running the household if their parents believed everything they said about their siblings and acted on them.

Next, where I come from, rules are not made to be deliberately broken. "Don't write on the walls" means exactly that - "Don't write on the walls." It doesn't exempt "I LOVE YOU MOMMY"s, the content of what you write would not get you out of the consequences, it might even get you in deeper for trying to manipulate a parent. In this story, the mother was villified as a preoccupied flutter-budget with some rather serious emotional issues, and both her kids knew exactly which buttons to push. The little one knew he'd eventually get out of the doghouse once she saw what he had written, even though he had broken the rule. If he just wanted to touch his mommy's heart and show her what a good writer he was, surely there was a scrap of paper and pencil or crayon, or even a chalkboard in the house - he had no excuse to break the rule against writing on the wall. So you see, he's not so innocent and loving after all. Maybe the older sibling even put him up to it, which would be very likely. And the older sibling knew Mommy would get angry when he/she told her about the writing on the wall. So, in this story, the mother is a busy loose cannon, and the kids are manipulative little brats.

The chain is meant to tug at the heart rather than the intellect, and make people feel bad for not paying enough attention to their kids or something like that. It tugged at my stack instead, which didn't just blow, it exploded.

The Rachel Arlington chain letter consists of both a "Don't neglect your kid for one second of her/his life" lecture type proes, plus dying child hoax.

The Slow Dance chain is also a dying child hoax with a poem, but it actually strips the real author, David L Weatherford of any credit, going as far as to claim this very introspective poem was written by a fictional dying child of the hoax.

Consider this next example, an exerpt from the Captain Underpants Name Game another chain letter that contained a very stale joke. It had a few lines on children VS. adults too.

And remember that children laugh an average of 146 times a day; adults laugh an average of 4 times a day.

-Hogwash! First of all, did the originators of this crappy forward actually go into countless homes and monitor and record every 'ha ha'? Second, I know for a fact, from my own personal experience that adults laugh every bit as much as children do. And, children especially small ones, cry and scream a heck of a lot more than most adults. Case in point, the guests who spent a weekend at my house at the end of January and beginning of February 2004...There was a lot of adult laughter, and far more screaming and tantrums from the kids!

Odd how apart from being ignored little angels with terminal illnesses and the ability to crush an adult, reducing him or her to a gushing idiot on their knees with a profound or witty tongue, or even a wide-eyed look, childhood is bliss while adulthood is drudgery in these chain letters.

Not, alas, from my keyboard, Childhood and Adulthood Responsibilities expertly puts reality back into the picture.

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