People interested in innovative employment practices will enjoy a new Japanese series that has just arrived on Netflix. It's called Old Enough! And in it children aged two to four are given jobs to do. The Netflix algorithm is clearly softening us up for upcoming changes in labour law and that's fine with me. I've known many toddlers over the years and in my view it's about time these slack-jawed goons were set to work.
Left to their own devices these idlers just loaf around guzzling "juice" (toddler slang for "juice") and watching CBeebies until their eyes glaze over. My terrible nephews have never had jobs and they're somewhere between the ages of five and 30 (everyone in this age range looks the same to me).
In the first episode of Old Enough! a 2½-year-old is sent to the shops over two kilometres away with a shopping list and a little yellow flag designed to stop him being run over by cars (being run over means an automatic fail in this programme; I believe the camera crew are forbidden from intervening). It’s not a promising start. En route he picks up a long stick and says “I’ve caught a fish” which is clearly untrue.
“He’s such a liar,” I say to my wife.
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Later he misidentifies a police car as an ambulance and I scoff at his mistake.
“He knows nothing! That’s not an ambulance. It’s a police car,” I add proudly.
However, my cynicism drops as soon as he enters the supermarket and negotiates the purchase of flowers, sausages and curry sauce with the skills of an infant twice his age. He even returns when he realises he has forgotten an item. I’m impressed. I’d hire this child straightaway if the law permitted. In contrast I wouldn’t trust my nephews to go to the fridge for me and some of them are in their 20s (fact check: the oldest are 12 and 13; but the point stands).
Protagonist
Episode two is very different. The protagonist here is a relatively stately four years old. His name is Yuta and he takes us all for fools. His family have a mandarin farm and he’s clearly been leeching off their beneficence for years (four years exactly). His mother, at her wits’ end after grafting amid the mandarin groves, sets him a simple task. He must return to their house at the top of a hill and juice mandarins for their 10 o’clock break.
Yuta sets off up the hill looking like an eager young go-getter. This is just a pose because, when Yuta enters the house he does not start juicing mandarins. Instead he fetches what looks like a small butterfly net and chases a local dog around the garden.
Look, Yuta, we all want to chase a dog around the garden with a butterfly net, but this is the real world. There are mandarins to be juiced which, in this instance, is also a metaphor for me writing this column despite the fact chaseable dogs are walking nonchalantly by my window and I have a net in the corner.
After an unspecified period of dog frolics, Yuta returns to the house. Finally! I think, but then the indolent infant just fetches a hat and returns to dog-chasing.
His mother rings. “Did you fill the bottle up?” she asks.
“Yes,” lies Yuta, before hanging up and climbing under a table to eat some snacks.
I’m not going to lie, at this point it’s hard not to admire Yuta a little. Eventually he clambers up the hill two hours late with a thimble full of mandarin juice. Everyone praises him anyway even though he’s wasted everyone’s time and they’re still thirsty and he’s terrible at the job he was assigned.
In the third episode four-year-old Hinako is given a list of errands that sees her visiting a shrine, calling over to a neighbour and then picking vegetables at an allotment, before returning home as night falls. Her work is excellent. I can't fault it. I wouldn't hesitate to hire Hinako for any job in the Irish Times really, unlike that chancer Yuta from episode two who will probably end up working at the Independent or RTÉ.
Some people seem to have missed the point of Old Enough!. They’re watching it because they find small children diligently trying to complete tasks to be adorable and uplifting, rather than to glean insights into the productivity problems of modern capitalism. Begrudgingly I accept that the participants (including Yuta) are delightful and the world as depicted here seems kind and safe. I suppose sophisticated viewers can watch this show on more than one level.
Another programme that's excellent on child rearing and child labour is Aaron Guzikowski's Raised by Wolves (Wednesday, Sky Atlantic and Now TV) which in its first season introduced us to two atheist robots raising six post-apocalyptic children on a hostile planet.
In the first series Mother, one of the robots, destroyed a star ship full of religious educationalists so she could give her children a secular education. Many readers will, of course, find this relatable.
Later on she has an affair with an alien computer virus and gives birth to a giant flying snake about whom she feels ambivalent. It’s a tale as old as time, familiar to many Irish families. Mother and Father (her robot spouse) attempt to destroy the snake in the molten core of the planet. This only seems to make it stronger and even more liable to write a turgid novel that’s really a thinly-disguised memoir.
In the second series, which began this week, Mother, Father and their surviving brood are accepted into the bosom of an atheist collective governed by an all-powerful artificial intelligence. It’s not as idyllic as it sounds. The AI makes amoral choices. Father tinkers away on an ancient android he found. Mother questions whether she has any identity outside being a mother, a kidnapper and a murderous weapon of war. Some of the children become embroiled in cultish sects. Some mutate. The snake comes back, in need of psychotherapy.
Uncanny
Raised by Wolves is brilliant. The future cultures depicted are strange and uncanny. The alien world feels actively alien and not just like an abandoned quarry in Wicklow. Each character is complex and unique.
And it's genuinely centred on the needs, joys and moral quandaries of child-rearing. Except with robots. And cosmic mysteries. And the great Irish actor Niamh Algar as a twitchy voice of reason. And space serpents. And children who pull their weight, not like that feckless party animal Yuta from episode two of Old Enough!
Some of us have to work for a living, Yuta.
