Paint-by-Number

After Ian McEwan's novel, I picked up a new book, NurtureShock.

To see how this book gets me hooked, consider the opening pages of its introduction. Po Bronson has a knack for writing stories to illustrate parenting. He talked about his nagging wish to dump the acrylic painting in his guest bedroom. What made him hate the painting was a sense of lacklustre copycat robot art that arises from a paint-by-numbers kit. He simply doesn't like how his wife's great-grandmother bought the paint-by-numbers kit and duplicated the painting.

Is it too much to think of paint-by-number kit as a kind of cautionary note for parents?

At stake is the very idea of conformist's don't-ask-me-why-and-simply-follow-the-number dictum. I sense it when my daughter happened to receive one paint-by-number watercolour and one sticker-by-number mosaics craft this month. Both gifts are set in such a way to literally fill in the blank after matching colour with the number. What we have in our heads are rules like one equals red and two equals blue, and nothing else. You just follow. The better you memorise the rules, the quicker you'll finish the work. You need to trust the pattern. You want to avoid at all costs mixing up the numbers and colours. Your product should confirm and look exactly the same as what appears on the package.

So I teamed up with my daughter to do the job. Red, yellow, and blue. One by one. We kept decorating the mosaics by fitting together small pieces of coloured stickers. The stickers looked nice, petite and sparkling. And those pieces finally made a mermaid. And at this point my daughter told me, as excited as a pirate who found a treasure box, that there were many pieces of extra stickers. I didn't know what to do with them, but my daughter stared at them like real jewels.

She said, "Oh, wow! I think it's now the time for fun. Dad, the blue sticker is just perfect for making a bubble, a bubble that our mermaid blows under the water. Now, what about this red one? Let's imagine and create our own picture."