I too really feel for Heze and Hosanna in particular.
For Heze, he seems to be enjoying his life as an uneducated football prodigy, but it’s really not clear whether he’s going to make a career out of it. How many kids from these junior academies actually go pro? It’s possibly not being explained to him that the reason for the Nike deal is because of the YouTube channel and it’s just pure brand promotion. He might genuinely be being told that this huge sports brand are following his football career, and think it is marking him out as a star to watch for the future, when it may have nothing to do with his skills on the pitch.
For Hosanna, I think it’s easy to forget that this girl is only 9 years old. She is styled by her mother to wear jewellery and styles of clothes that make her look like a mini adult. She is constantly having to follow instructions and look after siblings as she wants praise from her mother who often just seems to snap at this child who is doing her best to please. The video where Rue’s hair is being styled (an example of Grimwade vanity at its finest, a 20min video climaxing with putting an elastic band around the hair of a toddler), Ella shouts from the bathroom for the girls to find a ‘tangle teaser’, Hosanna immediately looks, can’t find it and comes to say this to Ella, clearly hoping for some direction…Ella is quite snippy with her, in a harsh tone tells her she has not looked hard enough, and then as Hosanna leaves to look in the places Ella suggests, Ella then has a moan to the camera about how Hosanna didn’t look properly. There’s no thank you for immediately dropping whatever she was doing to attend to the task of looking. In the recent video where the shopping is being unpacked, Hosanna looks bored but still comes in for her instructions, is given stuff to take upstairs and in a firm tone is told that when she’s done that she is to come back down for the rest of it. Yet, there are plenty of other children who could help, including Heze who volunteers himself, but when he is given items to take upstairs, he is then given the instruction to give it to the ‘girls’ and make sure they open the packets and fill the items into a drawer (nappies). So there is an older brother who seems willing and able to take on basic tasks, yet he has to go instruct his younger sister, who by the way she is spoken to by Ella, will likely be held accountable is something is not done to her satisfaction whether the instruction from her brother is passed on correctly or not. I do think that Tim praises Hosanna more and speaks appreciatively when she is helpful, but that doesn’t cancel out the fact that he is bone idle meaning she ends up having to help with a lot of the childcare and chores, neither of them seem to want to allow her to act her age, they want her acting as grown up as soon as possible because it conveniences them to dump on her anything they are too lazy to do themselves.
i think Heze could continue to be football obsessed into his teenage years, and continue as he is, until such a point where if he doesn’t succeed, then he will feel very lost as football is his entire identity and the confident boy could end up mentally crushed by not having a rounded set of other interests to pursue.
Hosanna will be the interesting one to watch,
she has her own mind and they like to treat her like an adult by putting responsibility on her, but what Ella in particular likes to do is to talk down to her and have her follow instructions. When Hosanna gets into her teenage years I think she will start to question why she is running around after her parents, and why she is being made responsible for her siblings. She will start to answer back and demand privileges and freedoms in exchange, they may then be faced with the choice of either pulling back on putting those expectations on her, making everything a battle, or giving her freedoms such as ways to make friends outside of her own family. She is 9 now, so developmentally she will still be happy with the company of younger sisters playing dance routines etc, but once she is into her teens the need for friends her own age could become a major issue for her.
At the Nike office, I think the reason Rue was there (with his own football) was in hope that he would also get noticed as opportunistic Tim will be hoping to make both sons walking advertising space if he can. Poor Heze was being manipulated to believe that his brother was there because Heze’s behaviour and ‘achievement’ was setting a great example and that Rue was learning from him. The reason the girls, who they miraculously found childcare for a business meeting, but couldn’t find any childcare for a medical appointment, weren’t there was also calculated. Having 4 additional kids in the room would have made it too busy and distracting for the PR people at Nike to get a proper look and some interaction with Rue.
A miracle seems to be happening over at YouTube today, Tim and Ella have been deleting comments, but as they don’t read any of them, it’s quite spectacular that they are managing to only delete those that are negative, their fingers skipping over the positive ones which are being spared. Maybe we’ll get a sermon from Tim soon on how God is guiding him to perform this miracle.
