Kid Life Lessons With Love From Peanuts

Before television offered hundreds of channels 24/7 in never-ending children’s options, the ‘70s television golden era stretched in kid glorious majesty. Where I grew up, that meant hilarious and engaging children’s programs sprinkled sparingly across three TV stations throughout the year where said stations pretty much all signed off by midnight.

Peanuts, with lead character Charlie Brown, exemplified a classic cartoon staple of the era. A consistent television program-insert at specific yearly intervals. And no matter how many times those specials aired over the years, they had to be watched in entirety. Every. Time.

I’m sure this is where my soft spot for cartoons submerged with adult themes, and subtext lost on kids began. Because “Good grief, Charlie Brown,” how could one miss learning that:-

Psychiatric counseling should be haphazard and affordable

Lucy van Pelt may have been an overtly controlling older sibling with anger volatility outbursts, but she kept a respectable impromptu psychiatric practice outside of 3rd grade class hours. She listened to her most frequent customer, a one Charlie Brown, over his school worries, baseball wrongs, and existential crisis woes.

There were times Lucy seemed almost sympathetic. Until on occasion she succumbed to yelling at her repeat client, possibly from career burnout or getting lost in unadulterated twentieth-century avarice. But for a nominal fee of 5ȼ per session and sale rates at 4ȼ at select times of her choosing, kids knew that even factoring in an inflation rate rise, we’d never overpay for counseling as adults if we needed it, whenever we felt like going.

Kids say all the important stuff, everything else is “Whomp-WAA-waamp-WHOMP-waaa!”

Seriously, a young child could grow a vocabulary off the dialogue content of those Peanuts characters, with beyond grade-level words thrown around like sophisticated, thalassophobia, and retroactive. And with not an adult in view, it’s no small wonder that whatever adults had to say wasn’t massively important and could be picked up from the conversation context. These animated memorables modeled independence for children to get up off their tushies and make societal contributions. Purchase real estate. Enact community outreach initiatives.

Heaven knows that since an eight-year-old left home on long overnight trips without parental permission or stayed out half the night in a deserted pumpkin patch solo and survived, what could adults tell them that would be of any real consequence?

Could those distorted words have been about antibiotic resistance? Forecasts of global warming? An era of music where there would be no meaningful lyrics and everything would sound like, “Whomp-waa-waamp-whomp-waa?”

Gosh darn it, that qualifies as significant! Subtitles existed back then and should have been posted for adult gibberish. I blame the production team.

Security item choice is a priority because alternatives in later life are pretty grim

The fuzzy blue blanket that Lucy’s brother Linus dragged around everywhere possessed awesome sentient being-like qualities but above all, it kept his heart and respiration rates down.

None of us ‘70s kids could have predicted the terrifying aspects of the world we would inherit and choices, the adults we were destined to become, would take to pacify ourselves about it. The addiction mud pool of caffeine, alcohol, food, drugs, sex, and/or social media makes a kid carrying around a baby blanket the tiniest blip on the radar. A soft woolen or any other such transitional object seems far less injurious than the unhealthy lifestyle choices taken en masse for self-soothing. Less costly and sustainable too.

So, why were some members of the Peanuts gang intent on prying Linus from part of his raison d’être?

Upon reflection, I believe jealousy may have been a culprit, owing to the fact that Linus remained one of the most chilled out and comfortable within himself.

Except of course, when in defense of the Great Pumpkin.

Tolerance of benefactors bringing love we DON’T want is essential

Of all the lessons taught by the lovable Peanuts bunch, this became a borderline societal detested norm as time progressed.

The term unrequited love first reached my young ears on the show, with plenty of character dynamics. Charlie Brown’s longstanding crush on the “little red-haired girl.” His sister Sally’s swooning claim over her “Sweet Baboo” Linus (a claim he strenuously denies even to this day.) Lucy’s outpouring matrimonial fantasies with Schroeder. And of course Peppermint Patty’s high-level covert/overt smitten-ness with Charlie Brown.

This mini-saga displayed à la relentless while the targets of said heartfelt declarations remained totally and repeatedly uninterested. It defined annoying. Insufferable. But each unrequited love recipient exercised forbearance, while each character holding that flame pressed onwards in hope of success.

Migrate to real kid reality where somebody is crushing on you that you don’t care beans for.

And. They. Won’t. Stop.

Years of Peanuts behavior patterning taught tolerance, but that program barely lasted 30mins. How could Generation Xers survive hours of daily unsolicited love onslaught? Not even a throaty Charlie Brown “AAAAUUGGGHH!” helped. We were never given appropriate coping strategies. What’s worse, some of us on the giving end never accepted defeat in pursuit of our love interests.

Midway through high school and that stuff is CREE..PY.

Full and complete blame on the Peanuts crew plus the monkey see, monkey do insurgents.

Tolerance extends friendship and courtesy to the messiest of the messy

Bathing and daily hygiene were mandatory. As kids, with so many things for a classmate to tease you about, being stinky was by far one of the most embarrassing and loathsome.

Enter Pig-Pen as a regular dust cloud of filth.

No one batted an eye.

They accepted him for what he was. A cloud of crusted contagion.

If my jaw back then was bigger, it would have dropped.

I distinctly remember once, he cleaned up and not a soul recognized him. Was it for a love interest I wonder? Either way, it didn’t help. Love may come and go but dirt stays (unless you wash with soap for crying out loud!)

Small instruments can make mood magnificent sound

A mild-mannered Schroeder wowed kids as a musician extraordinaire with his toy piano, rendering phenomenal classic performances. With his admiration for Beethoven, he transmitted a fascination for symphonic music and the belief (literally and figuratively) that with a small instrument, monumental life-changing sounds are possible. Small kids. Ginormous impact. But by goodness golly, I craved piano lessons! Psychological tactics by Charles M. Schulz and Company? Most likely. But I really didn’t mind.

Not all girls have to dress, look, and sound like girls to be girls

As the only girl in my family for years, this helped a lot. I would go back in time if I could and eradicate the label of tomboy, inserting free-spirited and athletic instead.

How strange though, being clueless for years thinking Peppermint Patty was a boy. I mean to be fair, Marcie did always call him “Sir.” Patty (a nickname for Patrick, I thought) had such a raspy voice and cool comfortable dress sense, that never in fact included dresses.

My older brother broke it to me one day. Shocked speechless I was. Did that mean prior to this revelation, I assumed gay rights flourished on a children’s cartoon back in the ‘70s? C’mon! Cut 6-year-old me some slack. I had not a clue.

You are not cool until you are 'Joe Cool' cool

Hands down. Snoopy exemplified the essence of coolness. Less somebody’s pet than a dog who could read, prepare gourmet meals, pilot an aircraft during pretend wartime, have doghouse sleepovers with birds Woodstock, Twiggy, and friends, as well as play on the local baseball team with an imagination to bury Willy Wonka. There was even an adaptation in the show for a popular childhood game called “Snoopy Says.”

Enthralled by Snoopy’s GQ shades and attitude to match, I became the proud owner of Snoopy socks and shirt dress PJs. A dog with that many cool points had excess spillage to splatter the less cool of us. Now, if only I could get my hands on some black aviators to complete his Joe Cool look.

Later, I learned the secret as to why Snoopy embodied cool. He made his own coolness by being himself.

Lesson learned, put into practice.

A gargantuan thank you to the Peanuts icons of legend who should be in the midst of senior citizenship by now if an accurate year count was kept.

Those life lessons were timeless and made some of us as dysfunctional as the DSM-5 classified. But hey, we were ‘70s kids. We brushed it off, kept going, fell flat on our faces, and got up again. And we’re still here. Jus’ sayin’.

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