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Japanese dad teaches son WAY too much about working adult life with visits to role-play park

Casey Baseel Jul 18, 2018
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After repeated visits to indoor amusement park for kids, son feels just like a lot of grown-ups do.

Japanese Twitter user @HattoriM sounds like a pretty nice dad. Recently, he’s been taking his young son to KidZania, an indoor amusement park with a unique and educational concept.

KidZania is set up like a miniature city, and kids can role play at a number of different jobs, experiencing what it’s like to work in over a dozen different professions, including as a firefighter, sushi chef, flight attendant, dentist, courier, or journalist. To make things feel as real as possible, many of the jobs are partnerships with actual companies, which allow the use of their uniforms and logos, and kids even get paid in KidZania’s in-park currency, which they can put into a mock bank account or exchange to participate in other activities.

▼ KidZania

There’s more to do at KidZania than a kid can pack into a single visit, and so @HattoriM has been taking his son every week, which is letting him get a detailed preview of grown-up life…which now seems like it’s gotten too detailed, as @HattoriM tweetd:

https://twitter.com/HattoriM/status/1018724516975935488

“I’ve been taking my son to KidZania every week so he can experience the different jobs. At first, he enjoyed it, but recently he’s started saying ‘I don’t want to work.’ He’s pretty precocious…”

Yes, it seems that by making the KidZania role play activities a fixed part of his son’s weekly routine, @HattoriM has turned KidZania’s role playing into plain old work. He doesn’t mention whether his son is doing the same activities each week or has been able to avoid any repeats so far, but either way, knowing that his weekly trip to KidZania is going to involve performing some sort of assigned task is enough to have soured him on the excursions.

World-weary yet understanding commenters chimed in with:

“So your son has come to realize the sadness of working.”
“I always suspected some kids felt that way after spending the day at KidZania.”
“And thus another NEET is born.”
“Well yeah, if you have to work every weekend, you’re going to hate it.”

As alluded to in the last comment, the negative reaction might be partly caused by @HattoriM taking his son to KidZania on the weekends because he’s busy with school during the week, leaving him without much in the way of unstructured free time in which to have fun on his own terms.

Still, that doesn’t mean that the time @HattoriM’s son has spent at KidZania (which also has many satisfied visitors, we should point out) has been a waste, at least not in the eyes of some other commenters.

“Well, if the experience encourages your son to become a self-employed entrepreneur, than it’ll have been a great learning experience.”
“There’s a limit to what kids can experience at KidZania, and if your son continues learning about different things, eventually he’ll find a field he wants to pursue a future in.”

It’s also worth noting that @HattoriM himself is anything but lacking in ambition, as he’s a researcher currently specializing in the structural biology of metal homeostasis. That’s a field that most adults don’t even know exist, let alone kids, and so perhaps his son will take after his dad and go on to have a fulfilling career that isn’t one of the ones featured at KidZania.

Source: Twitter/@HattoriM via Jin
Top image: Pakutaso

Follow Casey on Twitter, where he also had no idea his job would exist when he was a kid.