The Man in the Yellow Hat: Neglectful Parent

The man in the yellow hat is a bad parental role model.

As parents, my wife and I work hard to avoid potentially messy, dangerous and unpleasant situations with our kids. If we'll be out late, we have our children nap during the day so they won't melt down before bedtime. We keep a change of clothes for each of them in the car in case of a mess. And of course, we try not to leave the children alone long enough to get involved with any mischief. If they are in a different room from us we listen and check in on them regularly.

Not so for the Man in the Yellow Hat, primary caregiver to Curios George. He makes absolutely no effort to keep his monkey in line. George releases animals from an animal shelter, dangerously operates a parked dump truck, makes a mess of an ice cream parlor and lots more. In many episodes of his new PBS series, George is left to wander around his apartment building and an entire city by himself. All unmonitored by any kind of adult human supervision.

So what's the deal with Yellow Hat? To start, he never changes his clothes (except for the beach). His fashion sense is not a monkey care issue, but does indicate some sort of larger problem. He keeps a troublesome monkey as a pet in what looks to be a fairly large city. He uses no leash, no cage, no discipline at all. In the real world he would long ago have been evicted from his apartment and poor George would be doing time at the Zoo or some awful cosmetic research facility.

But perhaps Curious George author H.A. Rey had an allegory in mind. Maybe Yellow Hat is God and George is humanity. Left to our own free will, we are slowly destroying the world with our insatiable curiousity. We reek havoc on our environment every day, just like George in the ice cream parlor. We mean well, but without proper guidance from The Man we are lost in the big city.

Heavy stuff for a series of children's books? Maybe, but after the fiftieth time reading them to the kids, my mind tends to wander.