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| Rob's Soapbox | ||
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Congratulations!
You have finally landed on the one page on this entire site (and on the entire internet for that matter) that is purely without bullshit... my soapbox page. There are a lot of times during our show that, whether it's because of time constraints and other obligations, I don't always get to address some issues that I feel don't get the attention they deserve. There are even more times when I just don't feel like waiting until the show the next day to get some things off my chest. Thus, I have started the "Rob's Soapbox" page. If you have clicked on this page looking for someone to coddle your fragile sense of self-esteem, or tell you what you want to hear or to reinforce your outdated world view, then exit this page right now and go somewhere else. If you are in search of the last forum for reason and common sense left in the world, then sit back, relax, and enjoy. I make only one promise with this soapbox page... if you read long enough and often enough, you will eventually be offended. So here's my latest soapbox. Listen up, 'cause you just might learn something... |
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April 2nd, 2007 THE SIPPY-CUP-IZATION OF AMERICA Every story needs a villain, every message needs a symbol and every movement for change needs a lightning rod… I have chosen the sippy-cup as my target in my never ending crusade (or "bitch-fest," whichever you prefer) against and about American parents and the hypocritical and destructive way we are raising our kids today. The sippy cup is only a symbol because in all of the glorious points I am about to make, using ingenious examples to irrefutably argue how correct I am, the sippy cup could be replaced easily by the diaper, training wheels, curfews or myriad of other things that are meant to guide our children through certain points of their development but can also stunt their growth if used as a crutch. I am not against the sippy cup, per se. I do believe that it was invented solely as a convenience to the parenting population of this world, rather than as a tool to help the development of our children, but I will cede that in some cases anything that brings less stress upon parents may help them better raise their flock. Unfortunately, parenting has become nothing more than a status symbol, an obligation or a hobby for many in our culture, and has led therefore to laziness and misdirection. People no longer acknowledge, let alone understand, that the job of a parent is to raise a fully functioning adult who is ready to face the world and all of its horrors without mama and dada attached to them. Instead, parents care more about finding time for themselves, not being burdened by their children's needs and not having to deal with ever seeing their kids cry or be disappointed, even though that is a vital part of life. Conservative wind bag Rush Limbaugh has always said that if you compromise to make a law, you are compromising your soul and your core values, a position I always thought was rigid and nothing more than his way of saying that all of his beliefs should be made law while everyone else would just have to like it. The sippy cup, however, may symbolize how correct he is. Years ago, we all made a figurative deal; the sippy cup was invented and placed in the pile of helpful tools parents could use to teach their children how to develop, much like training wheels on a bike and diapers on their asses. The deal, however, was (and continues to be) that parents must use the sippy cup ONLY as a tool, not as a crutch and must advance their child to the next level at the early possible moment that the child, not the parent, is ready to take another step towards adulthood. Can you imagine seeing an 8 year old kid in diapers or a high school senior riding a bike with training wheels? No child over the age of 5 years old should have to use a god-damned cup with a spill proof top on it. Sadly, though, as so often happens, people have taken the compromise and taken advantage of it. Perhaps "Rush is right;" perhaps those of us that understand parenting is hard, is supposed to be hard, and is the most important thing we will ever do on this Earth, perhaps we should have never compromised and allowed the sippy cup to enter Americana. Perhaps there are conveniences we as a culture simply can't be trusted with, for the good of all society. When children are as young as 2 or 3 they are ready for, and desperately want more independence, responsibility and growth. Somehow, for century after century the world survived this stage of development without the almighty sippy cup but we're still researching the annals of history to discover how. Nevertheless, along came a magical drinking device that allowed the child to have her juice and not spill it too. Wonderful, I say, this is the training wheel of the drinking glass which is fine… but only for a short time. The only thing the sippy cup teaches the child is how to grasp with her hand, along with the ever so difficult mechanics of lifting the cup to the child's mouth in order to receive the reward of some Welch's. The sippy cup does not, however, teach the child about the consequences of clumsiness, stupidity, and/or not properly concentrating on too many things at once. When the sippy cup tips over, nothing happens. No juice spills and there are, therefore, no consequences. The sippy cup, therefore, is just a nice way to avoid the mess… for now. Training wheels are the exact same thing in the sense that they teach the child the mechanics of pedaling with her feet while using her hands to hold on and her eyes to pay attention… however, when the child's balance falters with training wheels, there is no fall and therefore, there are no consequences. Training wheels are just a nice way to avoid (or delay) the mess of seeing your child fall down, go boom, and cry. Sadly, a real life lived to its fullest has no training wheels, no safety nets and is motivated out of a desire to succeed, rather than a necessity to avoid failure, and that's why training wheels must come off so that a child may fall, diapers must be expunged in favor of toilets, and sippy cups must be removed in favor of real cups, with open tops, which require more responsibility and thus carry greater consequences when not given the respect they deserve. A child must learn to hurt, disappoint, fail, fall, spill, and cry. With these events and emotions come lessons that will carry the child into adulthood and make her a better person. Delaying the inevitable is delaying the necessary and that's failing as a parent, especially if the delay is caused by the parents' own selfish desire to "just not deal with it." A child that learns at 5 years old that a cup full of juice is not just a tasty treat, but rather a stain waiting to happen is a child far better along in the world than one who learns the exact same lesson at 8 or 10 years old. The lesson must be learned and the skills must be mastered so that the child can move on to other stages of learning and development. I am very very sorry that you, as the parent, don't feel like teaching your child how to clean up after she makes a mistake but you probably should have thought of that before you spawned kin. Parenting is a job, and a hard one, so get to it. These lessons apply no matter how far you extrapolate them. I always laugh when people suggest that we should raise the legal age of driving from 16 to 18 or 21 years old, as if delaying the age at which we put someone behind the wheel of 2 tons of moving machinery will somehow better prepare them for it or make them safer at it through osmosis. Proponents of such idiocy argue that the accident rate for 18 year olds is not as high as the rate for those who are 16, without ever acknowledging the obvious fact that the rate is directly related to having 2 years of experience as opposed to none. This, in a nut shell, is the sippy-cup-ization of America as applied to driving. A child of 10 who has never held a cup is going to spill at the same rate as a child of 5 who holds the same cup for the first time, just an 18 year old who has never driven will be as unsafe as a 16 year old. The logic just doesn't hold up, but who am I to inject facts and reason into an argument? Perhaps the most frustrating thing about all of this is the hypocrisy that stems from other movements led by the same idiotic "I never want to see my child cry" crowd that believes in sippy-cups for all until they reach legal voting age. While we stunt our children's development and ability to drink like a human, in other areas we force them to grow up and face the real world far too soon and for misguided reasons. For example, the latest trend of having children arrested and charged with crimes like assault and sexual harassment at the age of 5 for innocent childhood pranks like wedgies and playing tag. Yelling "hey batter batter swing," is not hate speech, it's being a kid and having fun so let's all just lighten up a little, take a deep breath and try, just for a little while, to focus on the kids, shall we? It's ironic that we live in an age where we are obsessed with our children, yet almost everything we do works against them and for our selfish selves.
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