I’m all for old literature, but I still seriously doubt some of these life lessons that our children are being taught. Like, if your parents die and you get basically sold into slavery to a terrible stepdad and two awful brothers, you shouldn’t do anything to improve your situation. Oh no, you definitely need to just wait it out and some magical godfather will appear and use his magical Mafioso powers (also a lot of money and drugs) to make your life all better.
Like, as a dad, I have to think about the things my girls will learn. They’re already impressionable enough to look at their older cousins and want to imitate them. Just yesterday Molly came to me and said that her cousin Sarah just went to a beauty clinic in Melbourne, laser hair removal is their speciality. Molly wanted silky smooth legs for her birthday. Just for a bit of context, Molly is thirteen. No thirteen-year-old without a serious medical condition needs laser hair removal, even if it is the best around. I don’t even think Molly knows what it means- I’m guessing she views it as a kind of haircut, but with lasers- but Sarah is getting it, so it’s great. Whatever Sarah and Erin do, my own girls must also…do.
I won’t pretend to understand beauty treatments. If Sarah and Erin want to look glam for the school formal by getting eyebrow tattooing, that’s their business and I’m sure my sister has already gone through the whole parenting shtick where she agonizes over it being okay. Hopefully she sets a strong precedent that I can use when Molly and Siobhan get a bit older. But for now, I think we just have to be careful about what our children imitate. Eyebrow tattooing probably isn’t recommended for children under ten. And I don’t know of any laser hair removal clinic in Bendigo anyway. No doubt they’ll know all about them once the grow up and start using the internet.
-Barry