Kids are forced to grow up fast enough as it is, how about letting them have their childhoods for however long it lasts?

Whose bright idea was it exactly to start manufacturing kids’ shirts to have trendy little sayings like “Princess” and “Pimp Squad?” For most of my life I’ve had the impression that most people want children because they think that in breeding a part of them will live forever.

After all, you can instill fun little ideas into your kids’ heads like racism, misogyny and just plain rudeness. It’s almost like an art project, only there are many people who take this whole “kids as extensions of my personality” thing a bit too far. Case in point is the idiots who actually buy these shirts and slap them on their kids.

When I was a kid, I don’t seem to remember having any desire to be a pimp. I don’t think I ever wanted to be a princess either, but who knows, maybe I went through a weird phase at one point.

I do, however, remember playing in sandboxes a lot and showing off how fast I could make it from one end of the monkey bars to another. Personally I think all kids should have a nice little place to play in — a private place of their own — and over the past few years the real world has been invading the minds of children to a disturbing degree.

I’m getting off-topic; my issue here is that puberty is supposed to hit you at a certain age. There is no reason to assign a label to your kids just because you like the idea of your little girl or boy fitting into a nice little peg-hole that you’ve had ready for him or her since he or she was 1.

If you’ve ever read Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” then you can probably understand my argument a little bit better. Predetermining a child’s identity seems almost heartless — it’s unfair to the kid.

Most of us already have enough to worry about in terms of living up to our parents’ ridiculous expectations of us, but if we think we have it bad now I can only imagine how messed up the kids of the next generation are going to be.

To be clear, I find nothing glamorous about being a lame, shallow person (Princess) or a manipulative, misogynistic jackass (Pimp Patrol), and I like to think that people who actually have brains share the same viewpoint. People manage to turn out either good or bad without a label slapped on their chests at birth so that their parents can show off how cool and trendy they are to their friends.

If you log onto www.babywit.com, you will be able to use your own sense of the world to determine your child’s perception of it in the form of customized tees.
As I already mentioned, puberty hits when nature is ready. I’m not so sure I like the idea of watching a five-year-old boy walk up to a five-year-old girl and lay some ridiculous line like, “Here’s some math: you plus bed plus me equals fun” on her, especially since the kids probably have no idea what the hell they’re talking about (or at least I hope they don’t). Kids are forced to grow up fast enough as it is, how about letting them have their childhoods for however long it lasts?

Buy some blank shirts for your kids; let them choose their own identities. Think about your kids and not how cool you want to look for your friends, or how much you’d love for your own ideals to live on after you die.

I’m very sorry, but you are not that important. If you are the kind of person who wants your kids to fit into a neat plastic mold of your choosing, maybe your ideals should die with you anyway.

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