Parental Guidance Suggested

I was talking to my three year old nephew yesterday and he was quoting lines from the movie "Drop Dead Fred." While some people would quickly decry my sister's choice in her son's movie list, I think that it's brilliant. As long as she explains everything as they watch it, I don't believe that he'd grow up all messed up in the head. The opening scene of Drop Dead Fred has little Lizzie saying to her mother: "What a pile of shit!" and my nephew has yet to say the word 'shit' because he knows that it isn't appropriate.

I think that children should be exposed to more than Dora the Explorer and Teletubbies if they're going to live in America. It's rough out there! They'd be much more suited to survive if their parents wouldn't coddle them so much.

As a child, I was raised on soap operas, r-rated movies, and porn. I found porn on my own... it's not like my mother handed me a copy of Bush Pilots 2 and said "have at it!" The point is that I was exposed to a lot of mature situations at a very young age and I turned out fine. There was one incident in elementary school that made the teachers wonder what was going on at home...

I was in the second grade and we were doing an English exercise, where we had to write down a three-letter word and draw it. Then we had to add a letter to that word and draw that. My first word was RAP, so I drew a rap artist and break dancers because I watched a lot of MTV. It wasn't until I added the E and drew a man and a woman fighting that my teacher took away my paper and told me to start over.

I'd seen a rape storyline on Days of Our Lives and the man and woman looked like they were fighting. My mother and sisters never fully explained what we were watching, and that's why I didn't know it wasn't appropriate to draw it in class. So much for parental guidance. Aside from that one little incident, I was a very intelligent and street smart kid. By age 17, nothing really shocked me.

Whenever I encounter a small child, I never do the baby talk. You know what I'm talking about! It's when grown men and women talk down to children by altering their voices to sound cutsie and calling things by pet names like "blankie" and "jammies." Those are the kinds of children that are going to get beat up by my children who call things by their proper names and use cutting humor that is completely wasted on the other kids.

My point of view is moot to some people because I don't have children of my own, but I know a lot of people who don't use baby talk with their kids and they think it's a perfectly acceptable way to raise their kids. Pediatricians all over the place agree that using baby talk makes your kids stupid.

Children may not be mature, but they're not stupid. With proper guidance and a firm hand (my mother preferred the backhand), they'll be fantastically witty when they become adults. Now the problem I'm having is trying to explain to my nephew what Drop Dead Fred meant when he saw 'cobwebs' under Lizzie's mother's skirt.