Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank Read Online Free Page A

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.