Daughter

Kids are growing up so fast these days. It's a cliché, I know, but clichés usually have their roots in truth, and this one is no exception. The lives today's kids are living are worlds apart from the lives we had growing up.

My daughter is nine years old. In many ways she's like I was at that age, crazy about horses, Barbie dolls, and the Little House books. For a long time I've looked forward to these years, when I would be able to share some of my favorite things with her and relive the magic of my own childhood. When we're rolling out sugar cookies together or reading one of the Great Brain books at bedtime, it's like I always imagined it would be.

But other times--more and more frequently as she gets older--she's nothing like what I expected. Though she's just in third grade, she's anticipating adolescence in a way that no third grader I knew in my childhood ever did. In the forefront of her mind are fashion, cell phones and mp3 players. When I was her age, my friends and I still took our baby dolls to school and we worried far more about being the school's double dutch champion than about whether our pantlegs flared too much or too little.

It's frustrating and annoying to have the same conversation over and over with her about why she can't have a cell phone ("Can I have one when I'm ten? Eleven, then? When?!"). It's dismaying to hear my mother's voice come out of my mouth when my daughter tells me that everyone has an mp3 player--I actually asked her the other day if she would jump off a bridge if all of her friends did. She just sighed and rolled her eyes at me, exactly the same response I gave my own mother, except that I was in eighth grade, not third, when I started getting the bridge question.

As irritating as I find all of it, however, I'm more troubled by it than anything else. I know that my daughter and her peers are feeling a lot of pressure to look and act in certain ways, ways that are way beyond the bounds of what's appropriate for nine-year-old girls, if you ask me. The other day my little girl's best friend came home with her after school. When she took off her coat, I couldn't help but stare open-mouthed at her for a moment. She was wearing a skin-tight black t-shirt with a scantily-clad cartoon woman and the words "Mistress of Discipline" emblazoned across it. Under the pretext of wanting to check the brand, I asked her if I could look at the tag in the back. I wish I could say that I was shocked to see that the shirt was indeed her size, but I've gotten all-too-used to seeing this kind of trash aimed at little girls. It's despicable.

When I was in third grade I still went to school in my Laura Ingalls pinafore and with Princess Leia buns on the sides of my head (not on the same day, of course; I did have some fashion sense). What's more, my friends thought it was cool. We didn't start listening to popular music or watching MTV until junior high, at least, and even if there had been a mall in our town, we sure as hell wouldn't have been hanging out there unsupervised on Saturday afternoons. It's hard not to look back wistfully to those good old days.

When it's all said and done, I know that this is nothing new. Parents have been saying these very same things for generations, appalled by whatever new thing their kids have cooked up. I'm afraid it will only get worse as my kids get older, and I don't have any idea what, if anything, I can do about it. I guess I'm just going to have to accept that times change and adapt my sensibilities somewhat. I can tell you one thing that won't change, though: I'm never going to stop sighing and muttering "What's this world coming to?" whenever I pass a rack of child-sized thong underwear.