I’m not the first mother to say this and I won’t be the last, but I’ve
got a pair of beautiful baby girls. Equally sweet and sassy, with a zest for life and limitless curiosity about the world around them, Nia and Layla challenge us, inspire us and fill our hearts with joy.
Even as they pester and pick on each other — and work the nerves of Big Bro — Calvin and I cherish them and do all that we can to shore up their self-esteem and maintain their innocence, especially in a world that seems hell-bent on exploiting and destroying it.
There are plenty of examples out there of parents who push little girls to grow up too fast and seem more than willing to cash in on their beauty and talents.
There’s Krista and Alex Stodden, who earned outrage and disgust over the summer by allowing their fame-hungry 16-year-old, Courtney, to legally marry 51-year-old actor Doug Hutchison. Instead of forbidding the union and encouraging Courtney to develop more than just her physical assets and campy YouTube videos, they’ve excused themselves by saying that they are allowing Courtney to make her own decisions.
We can’t leave out Kris Jenner, the business-savvy “momager” of Kylie and Kendall Jenner and their tabloid-fodder siblings Rob, Kourtney, Khloe and Kim Kardashian. Most mothers would keep a low profile after one of their daughters appeared in a leaked sex tape and capitalized on her late father’s legitimate name to cash in on it. But the enterprising Mrs. Jenner instead turned the bad publicity into multiple reality shows, more recently making sure that she spun the national scrutiny garnered by Kim’s quickie marriage into promoting her own memoir, where she offers details about the “wild sex” she had with another man that caused her divorce from Kim’s father. Wow, keep it classy, Ma!
Then there is Dina Lohan, the mother to actress-turned-addict Lindsay. Instead of supporting her daughter through repeated relapses and parole violations, she’s shopping around a prospective tell-all of her own, one that apparently glosses over her years of partying with — instead of parenting to — her famous daughter. Who’s to blame for Lindsay’s downward spiral? Fake friends, negligent chaperones, hard-driving directors … anything except Dina’s inability to choose between being a girlfriend or guardian.
It’s just as disturbing when I see young girls with parents who allow — and even insist upon — most of their school-free hours being spent in beauty pageants, using more spray-on tan, hair coloring and closet space for gaudy and expensive outfits than most women four times their age. An occasional pageant for scholarship money is cool, but when it becomes a way of life, teaching preschoolers to be hyper-aware of their appearance and society’s lopsided and sexist expectations of women, it reinforces the superficial instead of the substantial at too heavy a cost.
It’s expensive to maintain a household, I get it. The recession is real, and it’s smart to get in where you can fit in. But in their tender years, what do our vulnerable daughters need more: parents who reinforce their strengths, love them through their weaknesses and emphasize brains as well as their beauty — or moms and dads who double as pimps, preying on their baby girls’ vulnerabilities in a rush to sell them out to the highest bidder?
