Funny baby t shirts may well look cute the first time you use them but the novelty wears thin after a while. What is wrong with sending your toddler to nursery in a plain blue t shirt and telling everyone his name is Harry? Why is it necessary to give them strange names and dress them in funny baby t shirts to be mocked by all adults?
It's a fact that children do have to learn that life isn't a bed of roses and that things can be tough. Peer pressure is tough, growing up is tough, learning your place in society - all tough. But in a backlash against previous attempts to mollycoddle our children, it now seems it is essential to bring them down to earth with a bump by dressing them in funny baby t shirts to be ridiculed by their elders. Maybe this will have the desired effect of bringing them into submission but I seriously doubt it.
For those poor little darlings who have to wear funny baby t shirts sporting slogans such as 'If you think I'm ugly you should see my mum' or 'I only cry when ugly people hold me' risk getting beaten up by the big kids at school. This will turn some into jabbering wrecks and others into retaliating bullies and I propose we begin a lobby group to prevent this cruelty to children.
Of course, this trend is reaching across the water from good old America. Where else would we get surveys that this sort of treatment is good for our children? They think that giving their children monikers such as Pilot Inspektor or Moxie Crimefighter is a good idea yet we still take child rearing advice from them.
I think this type of ruling should be put into the same pot as being told how to correctly parent our children via text message and email. 'Hold on, little Heavenly Hiraani Tiger Lily, please stop smashing up the house in your toddler tantrum whilst I check my emails and see how best to chastise you' - somehow I don't think that will work.
Is a text message likely to come through at that precise moment when your child is laying on the floor in Tesco's screaming blue murder? Will it tell you how to minimise emotional damage to your child and yourself by this outburst whilst protecting the hearing of all those around you and prevent you from getting an ASBO that bans you from using that store again? I doubt it.
If our youngsters have got to such a point that we now need to make it clear to them early in life that they are bottom of the human food chain, would be not do better to stick them in straight jackets instead of funny baby t shirts? Of course, we could also go back to the old fashioned method of a smack on the bottom? Oh no, we can't do that either can we?
