License to Parent

I was just in the dressing room at a department store, not really clothed, when a little 5 year old boy popped his head underneath and said hi.

Being naked and unprepared for a visitor I laughed and said..."hi". The laugh and the hi both probably encouraged what was an inappropriate situation, but what else do you say?

Well...if you're his mom you say, "Hey you little pervert, they will throw you in jail for doing that kind of thing. Get back in here, that's what perverts do." To which the little boy replied, "I was just looking." And she said, "Well you can look when you are 18. But until then, you stay in here, you don't want to be a pervert do you?"

I can laugh now that I'm writing this out because it was such an absurd response to a child, but at the moment I was shocked. You know those moms you see in the store that you look at with guarded horror and you want to steal the kid away for a minute and say, "no matter what you do, don't listen that woman, she is crazy!!" She was that kind of mom.

Call me crazy, but I think calling your five your old a "little pervert" is not necessarily helpful or conducive to creating a meaningful learning situation. Mother son moment, five years old, jail, look at naked girls when you are 18? Just doesn't seem like the best approach.

When I was five, I was being a bit of a baby over a thunderstorm, and my mom said, "You are such a weeny."

I was traumatized.

A weeny? A hotdog? What is she calling me? What is wrong with me? Why would a mother call her daughter a weeny? Traumatized.

All I could think today was...this kid will carry this with him forever. Little pervert. Weeny. You just can't throw these words around.

In a college ethics class we talked about the long term possibility of putting a computer chip into women that prevented pregnancy until they passed a batch of tests. While this is the complete opposite of how God created us to function and procreate, things like today make me wonder...shouldn't we at least give a test or something?

Question One: Your child gets curious and looks underneath the dressing room stall, do you:
1. call them a pervert, threaten jail, then the pervert line again
2. take the moment to explain privacy, respect, and the reasons for having guy/girl rooms, and say NO clearly
3. or, drown them in the bathtub when you get home

I mean...we could eliminate a lot of bad parents right there. A test. We take tests to drive. Shouldn't we have some sort of test to pro-create? Or maybe a union of people who save kids from crazy moms?

AGGGHHH...what has the world come to? Save the CHILDREN!!! Abolish CRAZY moms!!!