On Vampires and Make Up

Correctly drawing the line is our greatest challenge as a parent. Trying to carefully balance the two extremes of protection and independence is the most difficult task I’ve found. How do I decide what is too dangerous and what is acceptable? Working out the whole business of being as crafty as serpents and as innocent as doves is a pain in the neck. Certainly I pray for wisdom and seek counsel from others. Certainly I look back on my own parents’ child-raising techniques.

But then I wing it. Two examples.


Situation One:

The primary problem of course, is that my daughter Scooter is a lot like me. I grew up loving to read and throughout my childhood read fairly obsessively. Both of my parents (avowed readers themselves) adopted a pretty laissez faire approach and allowed me to read whatever I wanted to read. Kadie and I have been a little more tight reined in our approach, marking certain stories (mostly movies) off limits. But a situation arose a month ago that raised an issue for me.
Scooter told me she wanted to get a new book, the book Twilight. Many of her friends were reading it, a new movie was coming out about it, and it apparently was making quite a splash among the early teen world. I’m not sure why there was some familiarity with it, but I vaguely recalled hearing about it. After some checking around on the internet, I read up on the book.

It’s a fairly typical teen romance book, telling the story of a young girl who moves into a town and desperately wants to fit in to her new high school community. In the course of her arrival she identifies various social cliques and tries to decide the folks with whom she wants to build relationships. Then she meets a guy and they fall in love. The End. Pretty innocuous stuff, except for one problem.

He’s a vampire. Undead. Immortal and unliving.

So at what age should a kid start to read such fare? I had no idea. So, I read the book (a review will follow, at some point) and decided to let her read it. She’s in the middle of it now and we’ll have a conversation about it when she finishes.

Situation Two:

Unconnected (but not really) was the dreaded conversation about make-up. She’s entering the second semester of the eighth grade and high school is now for her more a reality than a distant dream. (It remains a nightmare for me, of course). So she’s gotten serious about wanting to try out make-up. This subject has come up a few times over the last few years and I’ve developed a pretty good line in response. I would always say “You look so beautiful without make-up, why would you want to cover your pretty face up?” But she’s no longer placated by that line and has now pushed me for a timeline. After some negotiation (she wanted to start wearing make-up today, I wanted her to start in her thirties) we decided that she would start this summer, to give her some time to experiment before high school begins.

I’m not too sure my exact motivations in each of these situations, but in each instance, to some degree, I recognized that I was the one with the greater problem. I don't want her to grow up. So each of these situations has challenged me in the area of letting go. I’ve seen the end result of holding on too long and it's not pretty. I have students in my classes at school whose parents never let them go and they end up at one of two unhealthy extremes. Either they go wild with their newfound freedom, or they bring their parents into my office when I advise them and try to speak with them about some of their life goals. It’s quickly apparent that they don’t distinguish themselves from their parents in any meaningful way.

Operating on the principle that we start with the end result in mind, then we have to cut the (insert metaphor of your choice: aprons strings or umbilical cord) at some point if we want to produce healthy, Godly adults.

On these two particular issues, the time is now.