Filling a Gap

My first reaction was that this is one of the strangest prompts I have seen since I started doing the daily posts. However, I have been thinking back to my children’s younger years and their situation. We were renting until our youngest daughter was 16 and when we moved into my Mother in Law’s house when she went into a care home, a cat was a non negotiable part of the package. In the UK you were not allowed a pet in rented accommodation, which led to so many being abandoned by their owners if they were forced to move into the rented sector by the loss of a job or difficulties paying the mortgage. So, it led me to think about what my children did to fill that gap in their lives.

For all of them, the online world gave them something to care for. My oldest son, for example, had Pokemon on his Gameboy. My youngest daughter had a virtual pet called Cuddle which was a rabbit on the CBeebies website. One day without warning, the game was removed from the site and she was very sad for quite a few days.  I don’t think I realised until then how much emotional care she had given to this pixellated creature and I felt her sadness at its loss. Their games almost always involved a creature of some sort and all of the children would take care of whatever kind of animal, real or fictional, they had.

Nowadays, the rental sector allows families to have pets, a welcome development but one that I am sure will be very difficult to enforce,  but in the absence of a flesh and blood pets please don’t underestimate the importance of a pet on a computer screen that your children can channel their care and love towards, preparing for the day when that pet may be a real one.