Lady, when I was seven years old, I wanted to be a fireman. Or a cowgirl. Or maybe a nurse, because I had just gotten a new doll for Christmas (back in the Dark Ages of 1970 you didn’t get multiple dolls for Christmas, you got one, or at least I did), and I had been wrapping it in pretend bandages. I believe the doll had become injured after a karate fight with an evil Communist spy, or maybe Godzilla.
Anyway, my point is, why is this woman worrying about what her seven year old daughter says about anything? She’s seven. Next week are we going to get an article about how she’s been unable to sleep because her little girl told her she was going to be an astronaut instead of a stay-at-home mom? “All I could think of was the Columbia disaster. I found myself feeling guilty for wanting her to decide to get married and stay home to raise her children…”
(Via.)
And even if she remains firm in her desire to be a stay at home mom, what’s so awful about that? I mean, it’s not like the kid is planning on selling junk bonds or becoming a *politician* or something (grin).
I grow tired of parents who seem to want to work out all their frustrated desires in life through their children, which is what I suspect this mom may be doing.
I think she was just looking for something to write about to fulfill her obligations to Forbes.com. Parents are always doing this — using their kids’ “cute” sayings or activities to substitute for actually thinking about something. They think it makes the subject more “human” or something but it just irritates me. Once my grandmother used some thing I said to her in a speech she gave at church, while I was sitting right there in the pew. This was when I was about twelve so of course I just wanted to die.
What if the backlash from all of us
strong workingneurotic, terminally guilty, over-stressed moms is a generation of daughters who don’t want to work?Needed a bit of editing.
“why is this woman worrying about what her seven year old daughter says about anything?”
As the father of a 7 year old girl, I certainly worry about many of the things she says, frequently predictions of bodily functions in inappropriate times and places. Let’s not think about the time she had a urinary tract infection and saw no reason to not discuss it in a restaurant. Other things worry me with the thought that she’s going to keep on saying them when she’s older. I suppose none of those are the kind of thing you want to read about in Forbes magazine.
If the adults I’ve known are any indication, your daughter is definitely going to keep on talking about her bodily functions in public — unless you take steps. Peals of laughter and exclamations like “isn’t she darling” were effective in shutting me up when I was a kid.
In my experience, the bodily-function discussion goes underground (so to speak) from about age 9 to perhaps age 70, when it resurfaces as a catalog of aches and woes.
And descriptions of bowel movements. Look, if I didn’t birth you? I don’t want to know what your poop looks like, sorry. I don’t care if you find it fascinating, I sure don’t.
But a bigger part of me is very happy to be sitting at my desk writing or out at a meeting talking to the interesting adults who populate Hollywood.
Can just imagine the fights this line will cause when the little darlin’s 13…or even as early as 11.
Sigh. So worried about the greater sociopolitical implications of a seven-year-old’s choices.