Sadistic gift giving

A warning to start: This video is repulsive, but I can’t stop thinking about it. The scene is Christmas morning, and we see a youth opening a present. He first thinks he’s gotten an Xbox — but then he realizes that his present is clothes packaged in an Xbox container.

We see the kid’s emotions go from anticipation as he’s tearing the wrapping paper, to wow-could-it-be excitement at the sight of the Xbox container, to disbelief when he only finds clothes inside, to disappointment as he realizes there’s no Xbox for him, to tears and trying to hold them back.

Meanwhile, a man in the background, presumably his father, is laughing at his predicament. Closer and to the right is a woman, presumably his mother, who first eggs on his excitement, then laughs along with the father, and then, seeing her son’s disappointment, tries to explain that they can’t afford an Xbox.

With that warning, here is the video:

Some speculations about the psychology involved.

First, there is evidence of design here and that part of the purpose of the “joke” gift-giving was to teach the boy a life lesson. I got the impression that the mother wrapped the present, from the way she was egging him on initially like she knew what was coming, and from the way, after, she was quizzing him about how nice the box was, and from the way she readily tried to explain, repeatedly, that they couldn’t afford a real Xbox and that clothes were a necessity.

But it was a formal gift, and it was wrapped. Presumably, they don’t have an Xbox, but they found an Xbox container somewhere. And they chose to use it for this boy’s present.

So there seems to have been some awareness ahead of time that the boy would (a) be excited about Christmas, (b) feel for a moment that he’d gotten a wonderful gift, and (c) then be deflated and depressed.

The lesson: Don’t expect too much, even at Christmas. Expect to be disappointed.

I also noticed the quality of the father’s laughing — it’s a big laugh, and it is an ongoing and almost-uncontrollable laughing. Interpretation (again speculative): One type of laughter is a response to the juxtaposition of opposites. In this case, the father sees that the boy is experiencing first-hand hope-and-then-crushing-disappointment. Yet the man feels that to be a deep truth about life: You have big dreams but life grinds them down. The man’s seeing that experience made real in his son’s face strikes a chord in him, and that kind of laughter is his genuine response: Yes! That’s life! And you were childish enough to think differently! Big laughs!

Maybe one believes that life lesson is true. It certainly is the lived experience of many people. Even so, there is still the issue of how one teaches it to others, especially one’s own child. There are ways to teach negative lessons about pain and disappointment in appropriate contexts and in a way a child can handle.

In this case, the parents seem to be using the kid’s own dreams against him. They know what he wants and they manipulate his hope to cause him pain.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into all of this. Scanty evidence and all that. Maybe it’s only a practical joke gone bad.

But then: How do you respond when your practical jokes go bad? Especially if you’re a parent and you make a mistake like that with your own child? You apologize, you comfort the suffering child, and you try to make it up to him in some way.

In this case, we see the mother walk off and leave the child alone in his misery. Brutal.

I wonder about the lesson the boy will take from this. What will he feel when next Christmas morning comes around and he sees under the tree a present with his name on it? Will he also generalize the suffering of this occasion and resolve not to let anything hurt him in the future? It will take a strong kid to rise above his pain, especially if (again speculating) this is a regular feature of his home life.

Disturbing.