On a blog focused on teen girls, a mom recently wrote an open letter to the parents of Miley Cyrus. The only way you don't know about Miley/Hannah Montana is if you are not the parent of a girl under the age of 13 or if you live under a rock completely cut off from any sort of civilization, which means you're not reading anything on the web - including this blogpost.
We've all heard of Miley. And she recently made a sexed up, poorly executed, somewhat B video that has moms up in arms. Sweet little Hannah portrayed as a sex kitten - er, caged up as some sort of rare creature - is quite disconcerting. Great moment for moms trying to teach their little ones they don't have to be sexed up to get attention.
But I digress. What I really mean to say is that while I understand the frustration of the woman writing the open letter to Miley's parents - didn't we all want to pull them to the side and say, "Why in the heck do you want your daughter to do such crappy work?" - the real point is that it is too late to be giving advice to Billy Ray and Tish.
Miley will be 18 this year. At that point, a parent has done the parenting. You can't give your child your morals when they are 18. They should have been instilled already and by that time you're standing back, watching your child, hoping that what you've taught them has made a difference in who they are. You cannot force them to be what you want them to be. They are who they are.
Parenting teenagers happens when they are toddlers - actually, psychologists say their personalities are formed by age FIVE. Parenting teenagers starts the very first time your child smarts off to you. The very first time they make a bad choice. The very first time they want their way over your way. Parenting teenagers cannot wait until you have teenagers.
The hard work starts when they come out and by the time you've reached 18 if you're still trying to force them to mimic your morality . . . you're screwed. And this doesn't necessarily mean you've done a piss-poor job of parenting. Maybe you've done all you could and your child is an individual and for some reason - their personality and experiences - they've turned into someone very different than you hoped they would be.
Or maybe you've done a piss-poor job of parenting and it's just a little late to mold them into something different than you've already created. If you're first trying to instill morals into your child when they're developing tits and zits then YOU ARE TOO LATE. And odds are, by this point they're not seeing those same morals lived out in your own life so you're adding hypocrisy into the mix. If you haven't been living the very morals you're trying to teach then give up. It won't work. Why try anyway? Why are you trying to convince them to live morals you haven't been living their whole lives?
Maybe Billy Ray and Tish have done a good job of parenting and Miley has just grown up to be an attention-craving, money hungry, unprincipled little sex tramp. In that case, piling on their heartache with an open letter is just adding pain to an already miserable set of parents.
Or maybe this is exactly who they've groomed Miley to be. In that case, they really don't care whether we agree with the moral choices their child is making. Maybe they just used their child as another form of income and whatever she does that keeps her in the spotlight keeps their bottom-line in the black.
All I know is the 10 year old and the 18 year old that live in my house find Miley's new video pitiful, disgusting, laughable and pathetic.
So my parenting seems to be right on track.
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