You kids and your twerking bears....

I’m gonna start this post by saying that, yes, I watched the VMAs and, yes, I know that I’m thirty years old and, yes, I know that you are way too grown up for that (despite your lingering obsession with Twilight), but I’m about forty years away from filling up my DVR with reruns of NOVA, so in the mean time, I’ll cringe along with the rest of the cool kids.

And cringe I did. Because even though I still enjoy watching the antics of Generation Whippersnapper, I am in my third earthly decade, and there’s a lot that I simply don’t understand about kids these days. For example, teddy bears. When I was an adolescent, if you still carried around a teddy bear, you were vilified as a “baby,” but apparently these days you can tote Mr. Cuddleface around with you until you die as long as you’re grinding on him.

And who knew that foam fingers could be so evocative. This whole time, we’ve been wasting them at sporting events (WASTING!), when what we really should have been doing is tying our hair into tiny giraffe horns and using them to spank Jason Seaver’s married son.

Now, I’m all for artistic expression and experimentation, but I’m too old to understand the merit in pointless raunchiness. However, I do see the danger in it. My son’s first crush was Hannah Montana. He was only a year and half old, but when the first hints of “You get the limo out front…” came on the TV, he was mesmerized. He literally could not look away from her blonde wig and sparkly scarves. And I shudder to think that he would not have been able to look away from the same girl’s gyrations and crotch thrusts if I’d been daft enough to let him watch MTV.

And, Molly! Oh lord, my sweet baby girl. I can only imagine her as an impressionable thirteen year old watching her idol on TV and wanting to emulate every tongue extension and twerk. Because when you start as a tween queen, your fan base at 20 will still largely be made up of little girls. And despite your best attempts to prove your womanhood and of-ageness, a display like what I saw on Sunday night only affirms your status as a misguided child.

Which makes me incredibly sad because it shows that there has been no real direction in your life, that all the fame, money, praise has led to nowhere but delusion and an I-can-do-no-wrong mindset. So I guess I owe Miley Cyrus a huge thank you, for reminding me of the job that I have ahead of me. That it will take serious effort and persistence to raise self-aware, responsible, reasonable children and to help them transition into respectable adults.

And they will stumble, they will twerk (actually, I’m really hoping that Suttie won’t twerk, but I’m sure he’ll do some crotch thrusts along the way), they will act out and dress poorly, but God help me if I let them do it on an international stage. And there’s no way in heaven or hell that I’m going to sit idly by and applaud them for it. No, I’ll simply be waiting at home with a switch.