The plastic children started appearing in various streets throughout my town last spring. Perhaps you’ve seen plastic children in your neighborhood. I haven’t spent time in exotic suburbs to know if plastic children have proliferated the entire country or if it’s a local phenomena, although honestly, it seems like something they dreamed up in New Jersey.
The plastic children function as pop-up speed bumps. They are 2-dimensional plastic signs shaped in the silhouette of a running child and placed in the middle of a residential street to deter reckless driving and other acts of terrorism in a 25 mph zone.
When I was young, residential streets were dotted with yellow signs that said “Watch Children,” and, if special precaution was necessary, “Blind Child Area,” “Deaf Child Area,” or the ambiguously offensive “Slow Children.” But people stopped paying attention to signs. Too many of them, or maybe after seeing the same sign for 15 years they’ve concluded that there are no longer children to watch for, or maybe they know for a fact that the deaf child’s family moved to California.
So. I assume the plastic children were born when a parent noticed how fecklessly cars sped past her house. And being a good, obsessive parent, she couldn’t help but to imagine: What if little Hannah or Nathan had picked that moment to disregard her incessant safety warnings by venturing onto the hot black asphalt in pursuit of an errant tiddlywink… directly into the path of a bitchin’ Camero driven by a teenager whose texting with one hand and sexting with the other while going 50mph in a 25mph zone?
Tortured by this nightmare scenario every time little Sophia or Connor leaves the asylum of the familial home, the mother decides to become a vigilante traffic cop by constructing a vivid reminder to motorists that hey, you may be driving on the road like you’re supposed to be, but that won’t stop a young child from just materializing out of thin air and into your windshield.
Now, honestly, I have no problem with the plastic children as a concept. I believe there’s a lot of idiots on the roadways, some of whom happen to be 80 year old women in boat-sized Cadillacs, some of whom happen to be head-banging teenagers, some of whom happen to be jerks on cell phones and some of whom happen to be children chasing their errant tiddlywinks. As long as plastic children don’t start popping up on Memorial Drive, I have no problem with people marking their tribal territory by placing plastic children in a non-obstructive area of their residential-zoned street, because if it saves the life of just one little Avery or Jayden, then it’s worth it.
No, my problem is with my neighborhood’s plastic child, who always seems to be playing by himself. There he is, smack in the center off an intersection 50 feet from out house, not another child in sight, all by his lonesome for hours on end.
Plastic Child (image taken from cellphone -- black things are protective phone cover, not crosshairs)
I happen to know the plastic child’s family. There are two boys between the ages of 6-10, a mom who drives a Toyota Corolla, and a dad who drives a Dodge Ram truck that does not fit in their driveway and spills out into the sidewalk. I always see the family either coming or going. I never see the kids playing outside, although the little butterballs could use some play time. I suspect that Mom orders the boys to play outside and puts the plastic child up so she feels better about staying inside to watch The View. And, after the boys ride up and down the street two times on their bikes, they grow bored and go inside to play video games. Mom’s either too hopeful or too lazy to remove the plastic child from the middle of the street.
And all the passing cars slow down in anticipation of children, but no, it’s only the plastic child, transfixed in midstride, a specter of the past and of the future.
