My wife was reading the news this morning and she found these absolutely ridiculous quotes:
“She’s damaged,” Renee Rollins-Greenberg, a Los Angeles mother of two, told Reuters. “She’s got this teeny-bop audience, young preteens and younger, who are admiring her and thinking she’s this wonderful, pure innocent person. Eighteen is awfully young for this kind of display.”
And, then the coup de gras:
“I’m devastated because I have an 8-year-old for which I now have to have an explanation,” said another Los Angeles-area mother, Rosie Konkel. “She’s always looked at this character as a very smart and proper young lady.”
Why do you have to have an explanation for an 8-year old? How is said 8-year old going to know about this?
This what drives me crazy about parents these days. Everything must be “explained” to even the youngest child as if an 8-year old really needs an explanation of some smoking hot chick posing nude for private photos when she was 18.
After 9/11, we heard parents absolutely losing their minds because they didn’t know what to tell their kids. Same with Katrina. The same with the war in Iraq. The same with Columbine. You name it, parents have agonized over how to explain it to their kid who’s too young to understand it to begin with. For these parents, I have two ways to approach these stories.
1. Don’t tell your 2 year old and chances are he or she won’t watch it on the nightly news.
2. Tell them the straight up unvarnished truth (if you think this is dumb, then maybe you should consider not explaining big issues to little children, huh?).
Here’s how it works.
2-year-old kid: Mommy, why is everyone calling Vanessa Hudgens a bad person?
Mom: I don’t know, honey.
2-year-old kid: Mommy, everyone is saying she did something bad.
Mom: Let’s play Baby Einstein and numb your brain so this won’t bother you.
2-year-old kid: Okay!
Or, you could try this response:
2-year-old kid: Mommy, why is everyone calling Vanessa Hudgens a bad person?
Mom: Because people don’t like it when young beautiful women decide to undress in front of a camera. It bothers people, particularly fat ugly housewives who no one ever wanted to see naked to begin with.
2-year-old kid: But mommy, why do people pose naked?
Mom: Sometimes adults play games with each other and sometimes that includes taking naughty pictures of each other. Daddy and I do it, too. You should see the pictures we have. *sigh*
2-year-old kid: Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
When you realize how silly method #2 is, you also realize that you don’t have to tell your kids everything. You don’t have to explain everything, and you certainly don’t need to explore intimacy, war, terrorism, and such with a kid that’s 2 years old. Not everything requires an explanation, and if you’re such an honest parent that you don’t hide things from your kid, then stop being a hypocrite and share the truth; don’t pound your chest about how open you are with your kids and then give them half the story.
Vanessa Hudgens is an amazingly gorgeous young woman who posed nude for some private photos. It was a personal thing with her and a friend and the friend decided to be a jerk and release it publicly. Sometimes adults do things they regret later, and she regrets doing these photos in the first place. That’s why she apologized.
Done.
Amazing how simple that is.
No wonder I’m not a parent. I don’t have time to spin crap for kids.