Parents Leave the T-Shirt Alone!

For those parents out there that are actually putting forth the effort to be good parents, I give you kudos, however, many of you go a little overboard.

I could not believe that JC Penney had to pull a line of printed shirts due to the puublic outrage it received in response to the shirt's message:

"I'm too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me."

Apparently quite a few people believe that this message is damaging to our girls' mentalities because it propogates the message of "using your looks vs your mind" and pushes the stereotype that girls in general are trying to shake off. While I can understand the desire to eradicate the stereotype of girls needing beauty more than brains, I do think society has come a long way in understanding that this idea is simply what it is...a stereotype.

Women all over the world have proven that the female factor does not make a person any less qualified or capable of handling positions of power or respect. Whether it is in politics, major companies or the media, women are holdong some of the highest positions out there. There are still some gaps in equality between the genders that have not completely closed (i.e. wages) but progress is continually being made and it is due to the actions of the strong women who know what they want in life and strive to get it by making smart decisions and a lot of hard work.

A t-shirt, no matter what the message, is not going to change society so drastically that it needs to be removed from the shelves, unless it was using slurs or an unnecessary amount of swear words. A sassy message like the one above is meant to be funny. It was not created to define all of females in the world. To treat it as something other than just a joke, is rather ridiculous.

The stereotype of girls using their looks to get what they want continues to thrive, not because of humorous t-shirts, but because there ARE girls who actually do use their beauty to influence the people around them. People can blame TV, movies, t-shirts, magazines and etc. but the fact remains that even if you somehow managed to remove the stereotyping from all these sources, you can never get rid of all the females out there that live by their looks.

If you do not wish for your daughter to become one of the "just a pretty face" types, than you should be teaching her how to use her mind to achieve things in life. Rather than snuffing out publicly displayed messages of "beauty over brains", you should be openly talking with your girls about why these messages are jokes. Explain to them why it is better to use your mind to gain real and lasting respect in the world instead of trying to manipulate the world with beauty that eventually fades with time, thereby relinquishing your control.

We, as parents, should be teaching our children to take marketing messages with a grain of salt. Be strong, be you, don't be defined by society, media or entertainment. That is the message that will be instilled in our children, provided we repeat it consistently. Do not teach them to blame the marketers that are simply using age-old tactics that do indeed generate sales. Show your kids how to react (or not react) to such methods. Why waste your energy on beating down the merchandisers when you can use the same energy on your children directly by explaining what to buy, what to avoid and why.

This t-shirt fiasco is yet another example of lazy parenting. Lazy, not in the sense that they are NOT parenting, but lazy in the way they focus the blame on an outside source and force that source to remove the so-called problem instead of simply teaching their children how to deal with the situation presented. The epic fail here is not the t-shirt, nor even the merchandiser, but the parents who created the clamor against it.