Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank

by Celia Rivenbark

  I get it. Now that my kid is practically of childbearing age (is six the new seventeen?) I must choose from ripped-on-purpose jeans and T-shirts that scream things like BABY DOLL and JAIL BAIT, not to mention a rather angry GIRLS RULE AND BOYS DROOL! where an embroidered flower with buzzing bee should be.

  When did this happen? Who decided that my six-year-old should dress like a Vegas showgirl? And one with an abundance of anger issues at that?

  And why are parents buying this junk fashioned from cheesy fabrics that surely leave your dryer’s lint filter full of glitter and fuzzy sequined balls?

  I hope you won’t take this the wrong way—you, the mom on the cell phone flipping your check card to your kid so she can buy the jeans that say SPANK ME on them—but you’re going down, bitch.

  No, really. I’m taking you out, putting you on notice, slapping some sense into your sorry ass.

  Just for old times’ sake, I wandered through the 4–6X section. It was just an arm’s length away, but it was the difference between a Happy Meal at the playground and bulimia at the bar. So far, these clothes had been left mercifully untouched by the wand of the skank fairy, whom I envision as looking a lot like Tara Reid.

  Instead of being able to buy pretty things for my daughter, sweet somethings in ice cream colors, I must now shop at big, boxy unisex stores where you can still buy shorts that don’t say DELICIOUS on the bottom or T-shirts that are plain instead of, swear to God, a size 7 belly shirt with MADE YA LOOK on the front. Look at what? There’s not supposed to be anything to look at on a seven-year-old. Because they’re children.

  Sweet Jesus, what I’d do for a lousy ladybug collar on a smocked dress. Instead, this season’s Easter look consisted of sequined and chiffon body-hugging sheaths.

  I know that my daughter and I will fight about clothes in a few years, perhaps horribly, but, for now, there will be none of this Little Ladies of the Night look.

  And while moms and daughters have always fought over clothes (let’s face it, even Marcia Brady wore some shockingly short dresses, and those baby-doll pj’s in front of stepbrother Greg were icky), the clothing wars were usually taking place between mom and teen, not mom and first-grader.

  When you see a size 7 shirt that says SEXYI or a mom and her little girl strolling through the mall in matching shorts with JUICY scrawled across the butt, you have to wonder what the hell is going on.

  The saddest part about all this is that if you dress like you’re a twenty-two-year-old going out to a club after a tough day at work in the city, you don’t get to enjoy being a little kid.

  Deliver me from an outraged third-grader who thinks she’s entitled to the entire line at Abercrombie & Fitch. Put on a normal pair of jeans and go play kickball, you brat! And tell yo mama I said so.

  If you examine the offerings in the 7–16 department, you’ll quickly discover that it’s no different from the stuff in the juniors’ department and beyond. There is no distinction between a kid in second grade and one in twelfth grade and a college grad who’s started her first real job. Never mind how essentially stupid a little fifty-pound kid looks wearing an off-the-shoulder top with FOOL FOR LOVE in glitter letters. Hell, some of these kids can’t even read cursive writing and they’re wearing this junk. They adore it because it’s what Gwen or Avril or Ashlee is wearing.But you’re not on stage, I want to scream.You’re on the monkey bars!

  The big difference between my childhood and my daughter’s is that these days, the kid gets the final say. What’s up with that? I can promise you that if I was eight years old and told my parents I needed eighty-dollars for sparkly jeans to rest on my hip bones and a midriff top that read TOO RICH FOR YOU, they’d have thought I had fallen off my bike and my brain had spilled out my ears.

  If you want to get at the heart of the problem, which is the parents, of course, you need look no further than those “nanny to the rescue” shows on TV.

  It’s the oddest thing: In almost every show, the moms are spilling out of too-tight tank tops and Daisy Dukes. They look like teenagers, and the kids run all over them.

  When the sturdy, bespectacled Supernanny shows up at the jam-stained front door, it’s clear that a new sheriff is in town. The kids see her as someone they should probably listen to. Hmmm. Wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that she’s not wearing a tank that says SWEET THANG. She means business, while Mama’s over there cowering in the kitchen corner, all hair extensions and implants talking ‘bout “I can’t do a thing with these young’uns.”

  These children should be thanking the TV gods that they didn’t dispatch a tough-talking Southern bubba instead of the Supernanny. Bubba doesn’t care about any Dr. Phil–ish reasons for misbehavior. He’d just arrange for “a date with Mr. Hickory Stick” and a dessert of Dial soap while saying things like, “I’ll learn you some respect, lil tater.”

  Okay, that’s going too far, but you get the idea. I always preferred the count-to-three method of discipline. It was astonishingly effective. You want to take back parental power? Try saying “Onnnne,” then “Twooooo.” I never made it to “Threeeee,” because my preschooler shaped up, for which I am eternally grateful, because, let’s face it, if I ever got to three, I had nothing. Nada. Zip.

  If you ask me, the Supernanny should put the parents, not the kids, in the naughty room and not let them out until Mom promises to buy some clothes that fit and Dad can stop being such a wimp. (“Brandon calls his Mama names, and I just wanna cry!”) Grow a spine, you freak. It’s time to man up!

  They’re kids, not short grown-ups. Remember?

  4

  Flower (Girl) Power

  We’ve Got the Dress—

  Just Let Us Know When and Where

  While attending the sixth wedding of the summer (doesn’t anybody live in sin anymore?), my daughter once again looked longingly at the flower girl floating down the aisle to “Taco Bell’s Canon,” as she calls it.

  The little girl scattered petals from a white wicker basket, her moire taffeta skirt swishing noisily past us, her tulle hair bow taunting us.

  “Why won’t anybody ask me to be a flower girl?” Soph wailed.

  “Oh, sweetie, being a flower girl isn’t a big deal,” I said. “It’s just a few moments of glory, a gorgeous new outfit, a fancy hairstyle, and listening to a bunch of strangers tell you how beautiful you are when it’s over. Rather like an episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind, sugar lump. I’m sure your time will come.”

  At that moment, her little friend piped up behind us, “I’m going to be a flower girl for the third time next month and I’m going to get my hair curled on top of my head and I’m going to look just like Cindy-rella. You’ve never been a flower girl?” She tossed back her head and laughed, then formed the dreaded L with her pudgy little nail-bitten fingers, identifying my precious as a “loser.”

  “That’s okay,” I said, a trifle too loudly. “She’s just acting mean because she knows that her parents don’t love her as much as her little sister.”

  “Waahhh!”

  After this unpleasantness, I decided to put the word out that I had a flower girl for hire. We even had a dress. Last spring, when a friend postponed her wedding indefinitely on account of her fiance lost his life’s savings on one of those gambling cruise boats, we found ourselves stuck with a tastefully simple white organza dress with tiny yellow daisies dancing across the empire waist.

  I told everyone that Sophie was ready to be a flower girl, and I was past the point of caring if it was for anyone we even knew. I knew she’d be great at it, not melting down like the really young ones. I hate it when people put their toddlers in weddings and end up pushing them down the aisle. It’s not like we don’t see all this, and it detracts from the sacredness of the moment to see the fat bottom of some woman in a silk shantung suit duck-walking down the aisle going, “Go on now, Misty Rae! You can do it!” Inevitably this is greeted with tears, and the flowe
r basket is tossed until the duck-mama gives up and says loud enough for everyone to hear, “If you want that Dora’s Talking Doll House, you’ll move your ass down that aisle right now, little missy, you hear me?”

  My daughter wouldn’t even need to eat your reception food. Unless you were actually planning to serve Rugrats apple sauce and PB&J without the crusts, of course, which she would be powerless to resist.

  And I’d make sure she stayed away from that nasty chocolate fountain that everybody’s so crazy about now. I went to a wedding reception, and there was a little boy sticking his finger in the fountain, licking it down to his knuckle and then sticking it back into the fountain. It’s not just kids, of course. Grown-ups act like idiots when they get around a chocolate fountain, oohing and aahing and double-dipping their half-eaten wedges of pound cake and strawberries, spreading their germs everywhere. And there’s always that one redneck who thinks it’s hilarious to stick his head in the fountain and let the chocolate drip down his throat. I swear, we near ‘bout got divorced over that one.

  The point is, my kid deserved to be a flower girl, and so, amazingly, she finally got her chance when my husband’s sister, Linda, got married for the first time at age fifty-one.

  We were thrilled for Linda and Todd because they seemed so well-suited for one another but, to be honest, I was even more thrilled that Sophie would finally get to be a flower girl. Unless . . .

  What if Linda decided that she wanted a simple ceremony without any attendants whatsoever? I adore my sister-in-law, but she’s a threat to go all intellectual-hippie on me at any given time. To be fair, when a woman has waited fiftyone years to marry the man of her dreams, she has every right to have the wedding she wants. Unless I decide otherwise.

  I decided to give her a long-distance call.

  “Linda, if you don’t ask Sophie to be your flower girl, I swear that I will never speak to you again as long as I live.”

  “What are you talking about?” Linda said, genuinely puzzled. “Of course I want her to be my flower girl. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

  Oh, thank God! I had lost enough sleep over this. Sophie and I went shopping for the perfect flower girl dress (the one with the daisies was too small by now) and counted down the days to the big event.

  Todd and Linda decided to incorporate some rituals from his Native American heritage into their wedding ceremony. Before the service began, they had a friend set some sage on fire and “smudge” the sanctuary of the church to purify it.

  This was lovely and quite meaningful to everyone except for the late-arriving Aunt Tiny and Uncle Dink.

  While a nephew home from college for the festivities optimistically noted that “Cool, this church smells like pot,” Uncle Dink noisily shuffled from corner to corner, sniffing for the source of the “fire.”

  I suppose it’s true that once a volunteer fireman, always a volunteer fireman, because even as Sophie walked into the church in her first-ever flower girl outfit, back straight, hair festooned with tiny white flowers, shy smile in place, Uncle Dink was swatting at the air in front of her. “The whole damn church is going to be on fire and nobody seems to give a damn. It’s the damndest thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, finally settling back into his rightful spot beside Aunt Tiny.

  All we could think was, Damn.

  I discreetly pulled Uncle Dink aside and told him that nothing was on fire, that it was just a purification ritual that involved burning sage. He looked relieved, but the nephew looked crestfallen.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” I hissed at him. “Did you think we were going to hand out big fat doobies like little bubble soap containers?”

  He hung his head.

  The wedding was beautiful, and the best part was seeing the flower girl proudly posing for pictures beside her beloved aunt after the ceremony.

  Sophie had not only been a flower girl at last, but she had done it for someone she genuinely loved, not just some random couple that broke up because the groom-to-be couldn’t stay away from the Lucky Lady Floating Casino and Hot Wings Bar.

  Oh, and the second-best part? There wasn’t a chocolate fountain in sight.

  5

  Weary Mom to Uppity Teens

  At Least We Know Where the

  Continent of Chile Is

  There’s a great brouhaha brewing over the problem of poor writing among America’s high school and college students.

  Ain’t hardly none of ‘em can do it right, studies say.

  Some blame the text messaging craze favored by the phone-as-umbilicus set. We’ve become a nation of instant messagers that has far surpassed the shorthand of my high school yearbook (motto: “not badly writ”), the uninspired 2 Sweet 2 B 4 gotten. That’s right: I used 2B sweet.

  As long as there’ve been parents and kids, the older has whined about how the younger can’t write, spell, speak to elders, make fire, and so forth as good as they could at that age.

  I think that instead of pointing fingers, we should help convince America’s young people of the lifelong benefits of learning to write with thoughtful expression, correct grammar, and, of course, appropriate sin tax.

  We should get back to basics in the classroom, teaching that conjugation isn’t just something your redneck cousin wants to do when his girlfriend visits him in prison.

  He hadn’t oughta stole that man’s bling, nohow.

  According to members of the prestigious National Commission on Writing for America’s Families, Schools, and Colleges (or “the Hulk” as they like to call themselves), even the English classes don’t require much writing these days. And yonder lies the problem.

  When I was in high school, we were not only required to read such literary masterpieces as Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales, which I believe were both written by J. K. Rowling, but we were also required to write ten-page reports about them. And while this assignment was as painful as an Arsenio comeback, there’s no doubt that it built character and made my writing gooder than it had been before.

  Today’s students, say the Hulk, don’t know that you shouldn’t never end a sentence with a preposition. A way we used to remember this was to gently correct “Where you at?” with “Behind the preposition at.” Hey, this is what passed for snappy rejoinder back in the day. It would also get us beat up if said to the wrong person. (“Now where you at? On the ground, that’s where!”)

  The most important advice the experts have is to get kids to start reading more. I believe it’s already working. Just last week, I saw at least a half dozen sunscreened nine-year-olds sitting around a pool reading the latest Harry Potter book.

  While their parents pleaded with them to come swim, they waved them away without even looking up except to ask them please not to splash page 4,016 again.

  So as you can see, there’s lots of hope for a new generation of great writers.

  The hope dwindles as the little puddin’s get older, though. In a recent survey, more U.S. teens could name the Three Stooges than the three branches of the federal government, which, as those of us old enough to recall high school civics classes know to be the the legislative, the executive, and the Moe.

  It’s very trendy to whine about how little our young adults know about government. How many times have we seen teens draw a blank when asked to name this great nation’s vice president or, for that matter, the prime minister of Kansas?

  Teens today are not dumb. Quite the contrary. They have even invented their own language, an abbreviated sort of speech that allows them to chat back and forth on their cell phones using symbols and letters that cannot be deciphered by anyone old enough to remember mood rings.

  Thus, I’m looking forward to seeing you again soon (which, now that I write it, has all the appeal of sitting in the parlor and listening to 78s on the family Victrola) becomes simply ltr.

  I’m not so sure this is a gd thg. Still, you must applaud today’s young people for their technological savvy. Most can download an entire library of music in less time than it take
s me to pit my prunes.

  I believe we will see a nation in which Speaker of the House Jack Osbourne will say, “All we want is some frickin’ respect. Buttholes.”

  But, dear Jack, respect must be earned. Those who refuse to remember the mistakes of the past are doomed to end up on shows like I’m a Celebrity—Get Me Outta Here!

  What I’m saying is that it’s possible to be cool and to know a little bit about history. If you ask a teen today to locate Vietnam on a map, there is not a doubt in my mind that he will say, “I dunno, dawg, but I’m pretty sure it’s one of the blue ones.”

  Young people today have an abysmal knowledge of geography. They can’t recall the names of the continents (and, hey, nobody’s perfect—I almost always forget Chile).

  So what’s the solution to a nation filled with young people who honestly believe that Springfield is home to Bart Simpson, not Abraham Lincoln?

  The return of civics classes (which, by law, must be taught by the same guy who teaches driver’s ed and dates the homely but kind school librarian)?

  Mayhaps. Otherwise, and I hate to say this, we may be looking at a future that includes two words that should never, ever be put together: President Britney.

  While it’s easy to act as if we grown-ups have all the answers, we don’t. Witness what happened when I tried to help my second-grader with a science project.

  Scrambling into the backseat of the car at the end of school, she paused long enough to look me in the eye. Was that disgust I saw in the eyes of my precious?

  “You’re fired!” she growled with a dismissive flick of her hand. All that was missing was the famous Trump hair turban.

  Okay, so I “helped” her with a couple of school projects and they didn’t go so well. It was late, the project was overdue, and who really cares if a sea turtle is a mammal or a rodent or whatever, anyway?