Thursday, June 30, 2016

It's Us......Rant

  I am going to take this day to write about something that is a bit off topic because I can not understand how people in this country have gotten so ridiculous.

I read an article a few days ago claiming that Disney Princess's may be harmful to young girls development. Have we gotten so low that we now are looking to blame cartoons for our children's issues?

 Really, people, really?

These stories have been around for hundreds of years, albeit the originals tended to be more macabre and morose. Snow White came out in pictures in 1938 and I could be wrong but I don't remember reading that little girls were damaged by watching it. I didn't hear about how my great grandmother's ego was destroyed by a girl that ate a poisoned apple. She had real problems like living through the great depression and working hard all of her life just to put food on the table.

I grew up in the eighties and have seen almost all of the Disney Princess movies. I don't feel negatively affected by them although, I am sure some cockamamie article will claim I was permanently scarred by it and the pain is so deeply hidden in my soul that I just don't know it yet. I never felt stunted because Ariel lost her voice or Pocahontas sang the," Colours of the Wind". I mean, Sweet lord, this victimhood shit is getting a little out of hand if we are clinging to the desperate belief that Disney movies have scarred our children's future.

The problem isn't the movies. It isn't stereotypes portrayed in children animations. The problem is us.

We have strayed form being the parents we ought to be. We are too busy at work, at school, and on our phones. We watch too much Netflix and spend too much time writing tweets about how hard it is to "adult".

We do not spend enough time with our children and we don't really listen to them when we do. We are too busy, too distracted, and too self absorbed.

I see parents at the park with their children, not watching them, not playing with them, not interacting with them, but instead playing on their cellphones. They remain totally oblivious that little Jimmy is about to fall off the six foot slide face first. Facebooking, texting, or tweeting has become the most important form of communication in our lives. Go to the grocery store and look if you don't believe me. Hell people can't even drive their cars with their most precious cargo inside without fucking looking at their phones. They are putting their lives, their children's lives, and everyone else on the roads live's at risk for a text message they could have read when they pulled into their own driveway...

I don't know who they are messaging but I know damn sure, Princess Jasmine didn't send that omni-important text....

We send our children to school assuming that our children will learn what they need to strive in life but don't actually know what lessons are being taught. Most of us have no idea. That is the schools job so why should we be involved?

We don't realize that many of the children's books are not as factual as they should be. The history books may mention the Holocaust but doesn't explain how the Nazis were inspired by eugenics that was created by Darwin and perpetuated on criminals and the mentally ill in the states. It has little to no information of the Native Tribes that lived in this country long before the Europeans ever set foot here and lacks accurate descriptions of the hell holes they were forced to live on. There is no real discussion on the who the presidents were as actual people. Andrew Johnson was a drunk and Warren G. Harding was a man whore, not that anyone even remembers those two because we don't really go in depth about the people that have ruled this country.

 See if your child is reading Shakespeare, Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, or Fredrick Douglass. Go ask your fifth grader if they know who Napoleon was and what he did. Ask a senior in high school what the secretary of state does. Ask a college student which countries were the allies in WWII and who was our president at that time. Ask any of the children that you know to show you on a map where England, France, or Australia are located. Ask them where Brazil is. See if they know that there are pyramids in Peru.

I bet you most of them have no idea.


To the victor goes the spoils and the victors have given us such great things as Common Core. Our children learn about next to nothing and are forced to cram so much into such a small time frame they retain little to none of that knowledge. There are high schoolers who can not read nor write in cursive and we have allowed this to happen because we did not pay attention.

That wasn't Disney. That wasn't a girl wearing a crown in a fancy dress drawn with crayons and markers. That was us.

We tell little girls that they are princesses and should demand what they want and never be told no. We tell them they can wear what they want and not be looked at or talked about, which is not based in reality. We tell little girls that one day their prince will come and make everything better so pay attention to how you look and not what is in your mind or your education because to be a girl is to be above all else, pretty.

We sell make up to them with the pretense that they are not pretty enough without it. We tell them they need to be skinny to be beautiful. We tell them that when they get thin they must also have big breasts because that is how the ideal woman looks and we all must strive for perfection. We let magazines tell our little girls that they should be sexy but not whorish. That they should show their bodies off  but also be humble about it. That they should be worried about boyfriends instead of grades. We want to make sure they fill out that college application but remember to make duck lips while they do it...

 We bombard them with  advertisements that make women look sexual as they do the most mundane things. Sexy women eating hamburgers. Sexy women shaving their armpits. Sexy women eating  pieces of chocolate while moaning. What the fuck is this? Who eats like that? Who looks like that all of the time? No one. This is not reality in any sense of the word. It's ridiculous and yet our children are growing up thinking that this is the epitome of a real woman.

 We as women, talk about our own bodies with shame and disgust in front of our daughters and it teaches them to hate their own bodies. We are obsessed with looks and have taught our children that looks outweigh brains. That what is on the outside is more valuable that what is on the inside.

Cinderella isn't showing our little girls how to be disgusted that they don't look like Barbie, that is all on us.


We ask Facebook friends how to punish our children because we are unsure. We can't make decisions on our own childcare because we have been told by every online media source, baby whiner advocacy group, and news rag that everything we do is wrong and "damaging" to our children. We believe that we must not punish our children, we must let them have everything they want and never tell them no. We can not spank, we can not ground, we can not tell them what to do or it might hurt their feelings. We put feelings above behavior and we can't seem to acknowledge how stupid that really is because we make too many excuses and apparently we are fine with it or we would stop reading such tripe and believing it.

 Mulan didn't tell us how to parent so I guess we have to look at someone else to float the blame....

We have children that throw monumental fits and act like complete  assholes and the parents ignore it or make excuses for it. Our children are completely hopped up on ADD medications and because we don't know what to do with hyper kids that don't actually have ADD but just need to go play outside,  they get addicted to them and then move onto harder drugs. We scratch our heads and wonder how they got like this. Sure there are children that are autistic and do have ADD but lets not pretend it is every kid on the freaking planet because it isn't. There is no way in hell every child on the face of the earth needs to be medicated and sedated.

I'm looking at you, Sleeping Beauty...

We think the fits and alligator tears of a child going ballistic is cute. It's not cute, it fucking annoying and before someone starts screaming at me that I wouldn't know, I am a parent of two boys. One has an anxiety disorder and the other has severe ADD and they never acted that way in public because they knew I did not need to go to Facebook to decide a punishment.

And the public will get their pitchforks ready because someone is offended that I am telling the truth and they need to make excuses for their shitty parenting in....3....2...1.

If your child has special needs then this post isn't about you so sit down. This is about the parents that do not watch nor interact with their children. The one's who look at their phones instead of correcting their child's behavior. The ones that don't wipe the years worth of food off their child's faces nor wipe their snot covered noses. The ones that have no idea where their children are or what they are doing because they are too busy not caring nor paying attention. The countless parents that ignore their children and then have the audacity to pretend they do not know why their child is a little grime covered monster.


Your children who think they are special snowflakes are brats. Spoiled rotten, attention seeking, brats steeped in the victimhood that is today's excuse perpetuated by the media that everyone has an issue and everyone needs a fucking pass for their bad behavior because their life is traumatizing for having just been born.

And because Belle got to dance with a talking clock and chipped teacup and they didn't we should all cry and throw ourselves on the floor and bitch about how unfair life really is....

Someone told us that Disney Princesses are ruining our children and we are so desperate to believe that it wasn't our fault that we eat that ridiculous notion up. So we can firmly lay the blame on the devices our children use, and the games they play, the youtube they watch, the cell phones they have, and the Disney princesses they idolize

....but...

who bought those things for them, who gives them the money to purchase the games and cellphone apps, and who turns a blind all to all that they do on those devices because they are too busy being wrapped up in their own shit to spend any actual time with their own children?

I could be wrong, but I am pretty sure it wasn't Tinkerbell.

 We don't want to look at who is really responsible because then we would have to shoulder the blame and take the responsibility that we have failed because we are too wrapped up in things that do not matter or at the very least, should not matter as much as the raising of our children.  Children that one day will be adults raising the next generation and won't know how to do it because all we ever gave them was poor excuses and a ripe sense of victimhood.

We don't want to admit that we are failing our children because we have gotten adept at not seeing the truth. It is easier lie to them than to admit our own shortcomings. We tell them that it is okay not to follow the rules. We tell them they can do what they want when they want. We tell them not to have their own opinions or beliefs and to believe that everyone else's opinions are more important than their own. We tell them history is not important and is perfectly okay to bend to their ideals and to erase. We tell them they don't need to know who they are as a person as long as they look good and take lots of pictures while doing so. We tell them minds are not to be fed and educated but to be indoctrinated with complete and utter bullshit. We are responsible for this. We and only we.

We lie to their faces and pretend that we aren't the ones making their lives impossible to navigate when they become full grown adults without the tools to do so because they have been treated like a victim all of their lives because it was easier for us to do so......We lie to them as we tuck them into bed and tell them just how much we love them, right before we look down at our cellphones and hit the like button on a Facebook cat meme.

But sure, let's blame Rapunzel for that too, if it makes you sleep better at night.

Neurotic Nelly

5 comments:

  1. Damn! Lots of anger there… Where to start? In general, I find my children to be much more knowledgeable than I was at their age. I don’t think they can give much information about WWII, but they can tell you minutiae about the civil war (we live in Gettysburg). So much more information is available now. It is impossible to know it all. They’ve told me about an animal called a Narwhal. Something I had never heard of as a kid. Much like a Meerkat, or a bazillion other things that have become commonly known since I was young.

    When Common Core was rolled out our reasonably strong school district found that we were behind in curriculum. Some districts require national standards so that they don’t get all caught up in focusing on school district standards (like intelligent design). I agree that the focus on passing tests is a problem, but I don’t think it is Common Core curriculum. It is our propensity to link federal funding to these standards (which has been going on for at least 12 years).
    You cannot possibly put yourself in every parent’s shoes. I agree that I see a lot of what looks like crappy parenting, but also living in a tourist town, I see a lot of what looks like very engaged parenting. My parents didn’t poke at their phone, and yes they did spank, but I’m not certain I’m any better for it. I know as a parent, I’m WAY more engaged with my kids than my father was (and he was a great father). I also know that spanking my kids might make *me* feel better when I’m pissed at them, but it isn’t going to improve their behavior.
    I could go on and on. I never do this on blogs, but I couldn’t contain myself. I don’t expect you to allow this comment on your site, but I encourage you to look into what really bothering you. This is bigger than being set off by princesses.

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    Replies
    1. Jeff Cann,
      I would like to clear up a few things about this post and why I wrote it.
      Firstly,I nowhere in my blog said that I agreed with spanking. I said we are told not to do so. As we are also told in one way or another that grounding is also bad as well as anything related to punishments.
      Secondly,I have lived in a very large city, not a tourist city. I have never been to Tennessee so I have no idea how the parents act there, but if it is a tourist area I would have to make the assumption that those parents cared enough about their kids to actually take them somewhere.
      As for the education, again in the large city areas, it is laughable to even call it an education. My children know more than the average public school student that doesn't get help at home. I am involved in their learning process. I had to be, the tests have made learning and retaining almost impossible. The education here has been strangled by it policies and schools have been merged and some have been closed.
      I am angry but it isn't something I need to do deep soul searching for. I have seen it where I have lived. I have watched other parents do it everywhere I go. I have watched the dirt/food covered kids throw fits in the store and slap their parents. The parents that were on the phone at the park when their children got injured. The parents who didn't monitor what their kids were doing.Living in a large city as I did, I watched countless underage children walk the streets at night without their parents knowing where they were. I have seen these children get into trouble and I have watched them end up in gangs. I have watched parents pawn their children off on their own parents because they wanted to have a life of more partying rather than a life of responsibility. I saw a mother once strike her toddler repeatedly because "he made her late for the bus" as they were walking down the street. I have seen parents not walk with their child or even look at them as they both cross intersections and have seen those children almost get hit by cars. I have seen horrid abuse and woeful neglect and I have always heard the excuses for those things as if it wasn't the parents fault. I am angry that this generation (not all of us but a good number of us) refuses to connect with their children and treats them more like a burden than a child that will one day expect to be a functioning adult. This Disney Princess thing is just another deflection to make it seem as though we have someone else to blame for us being poor parents to our children rather than to look at what we are doing wrong.
      Furthermore, I don't know why people assume that if someone is talking about something they have seen that they misundertsood what they have witnessed.
      Did I misunderstand the lady knocking the crap our of her kid, or the mom that ignored her children while texting as her oldest kid was pulling the hair out of his baby brothers head while he screamed? What about the children who struggle with literacy because the parents would rather party than work with their child? How about the children who do not have a coat for the harsh winters or haven't had a bath for weeks but the parents have a new car or new top of the line cellphones and new clothes?
      I am not just angry, I am furious. It is upsetting and people should be angry because as long as we continue to deflect, we let our children down even more. As long as we believe the media hype we ignore the most precious things on this earth, our children. As long as we blame inanimate objects and princesses drawn on paper instead of ourselves we can not change.
      I am glad you had an amazing father and are also a considerate and loving father to your kids. That is what we need. We need parents who are there for their children.

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  2. Many children don't have fathers. Many children have parents or a parent that are not tuned in to their children's needs and their children's lives.
    I am not angry with the parents that do what they are supposed to do and are doing the best that they can but I have seen so very many that just do not care. No one is a perfect parent. We all make mistakes but I am not talking about those parents.I am talking about the mass amount of parents that can not be bothered to care, listen to, or give the tiniest bit of interest in their own offspring.
    I am angry that the media continues to push an ideal that the failings of the adults aren't the reason so many children are in the situation they are in, but instead it is a cartoon, or a book, or a video game, or anything else but the person that is supposed to be raising the child in the first place. I am angry about the princesses because it is utter crap and it is high time we stop looking for excuses and start looking at ourselves.

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  3. So I'm confused and as I have many problems just need to know, can I or can I not blame my....Teddy bear. :)

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  4. Lol TR, for you I will make the exception. You and only you can blame your teddybear.

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