It’s that time of year when millions of mothers open their children’s school backpacks and wince.
We do not recoil because the child’s books are crusted with the accrued crumbs of a hundred lunchtime cookies (that comes later). We do not cringe at appallingly written essays marked “See me” (not yet, anyway).
No, we flinch because there, inescapably, are fresh sheets of colorful paper stapled together bearing the headline: “Picture Day is Coming!”
One glimpse of that paperwork and twang go the guilt strings. “Capture the Moment,” we are urged, in curly, persuasive writing. “Don’t let this time pass by. Share your pride in their accomplishments. …”
We don’t want to let the time pass by! We do want to share our pride! But – ugh! Can’t we do it some other way? We love our children, really we do, but we don’t want images of them radiating a soft-focus halo, or smiling with one hand on a globe, or pressed coyly up against a tree, or, as one local mother remembers with perplexity, “posed in front of a cut-out cactus. Here. In D.C.”
Don’t get us wrong: We like the group picture, with the teacher, and we’re happy to pay for it. We like encountering old photos of Miss Koepp, our fourth-grade teacher, with ourselves beaming goofily from the third row.
But individual school pictures we don’t like, many of us. They are troublesome relics of the past, like the appendix: Still around though no one needs them, their only apparent purpose being occasionally to flare up and cause expense.
“I hate it, I hate it,” says a frazzled Bethesda mother.”I do buy them because I feel bad about my kids being the only ones walking out without photos. I have the idea that I’ll put them in order but that will never happen. I don’t even know where half of them are. Basically, for each child it’s ‘Here’s another $36 check for a packet of pictures that’s going to sit in a file.’ ”
A Virginia mother agrees. “At public school, we get a double whammy: Back to school and year-end photos,” she says. “We buy the basic package, but only out of a twisted obligation.”
The obligation is, of course, twofold: Those of us who knuckle under the pressure do so to honor our children and, ideally, the grandparents who will receive the shiny 3 x 5s with rapture; we’re also aware that photo sessions raise money for schools, and we feel cheese paring if we don’t contribute.
True, there are some soft touches in the crowd. “I like them,” says one, a D.C. mother who says she enjoys seeing her children’s faces evolve in a multiyear progression of same-angle shots. “Though I’ve had to skip some years and trash the pictures because they turned out awful,” she concedes, “and sometimes that ‘Italian ice blue’ background is too much to handle.”
For me, it’s disquieting that children in school photos always look the same. Maybe it’s because the snaps are taken by strangers, and maybe it’s because every kid in the class gets the same background, but school photos have the effect of reducing one’s own endearing, quirky child to a bland, smiling Everychild — like a face on the milk carton.
“I don’t buy them,” says another D.C. mother firmly, “because, as a former police reporter, they remind me of what we used to call the ‘pick up,’ the photo of the murdered kid you had to go ask for from the grieving family.”
Given that we live in an era in which even the cheapest cell phones now come equipped with cameras, maybe schools — if they must persist with selling our children back to us on photo stock — should take a more imaginative approach.
Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of the gormless grins of today, parents could buy stiff, sepia-toned school portraits, in the style of Matthew Brady? Who wouldn’t vastly prefer, say, scenes of playground combat in black and white, as if captured by Robert Capa?
Now those would be school pictures worth having.
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursday.
