Jenny McCarthy and Autism
Everytime I turn on the news or open up a magazine, this bimbo is blabbering on about her kid with autism. Don't get me wrong, I have sympathy for the real kids with autism and the parents who raise them, but enough already.
We had the Susan Komen pink ribbons, the Lance Armstrong Livestrong bracelets and now Jenny and her goofball boyfriend, the once funny Jim Carrey, hoisting the kid in front of cameras everywhere and hollering, "See, he has autism!" As if the kid will ever have a normal life?
Frankly, I'm not even sure what autism is and if kids really have it or if they are just plain snotty brats? I did see the movie "Rain Man" and Tom Cruise's brother could do way hard math problems in his head, and count the number of matches that were spilled on the floor. I think he was autistic - or mentally retarded. It just seems like we have to invent new names that are less caustic than their predecessors.
I always thought ADHD (ADD?) was the illness-de-jour of the 90's and beyond? Personally, I always thought that parents who said their kid had ADD really didn't know what the hell they were talking about and that the kid was just being a kid. I still believe that. I think their little brains are fried with video games and sugar and since they can't slow down and concentrate on their social studies, parents just throw up their arms, and say, "ADD." When I was little, we didn't have fancy names to label children and create an immediate excuse for when they fail. When we failed in the 1960's, we failed. Now parents and society want to BLAME it on someone or something. The problem is that this sort of lame excuse-making places a stigma on the kid that he or she will fall back on for the rest of their lives.
I know this all sounds a tad blunt, but these labels are too easily and too readily applied to kids today and it will affect them for the rest of their lives. In most cases, I just believe it's lazy parenting.
We give trophies to the kid who finishes last. Teams can't cut anyone. When I coached baseball, and soccer the league instruction was that all the kids were required to play a reasonably equal amount of time. Winning wasn't a priority. As the late, great Vince Lombardi once said, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, we were allowed to fail. The prospect of failing made me work harder. Now? Not so much. Pathetic isn't it?
This bothers me.
Everytime I turn on the news or open up a magazine, this bimbo is blabbering on about her kid with autism. Don't get me wrong, I have sympathy for the real kids with autism and the parents who raise them, but enough already.
We had the Susan Komen pink ribbons, the Lance Armstrong Livestrong bracelets and now Jenny and her goofball boyfriend, the once funny Jim Carrey, hoisting the kid in front of cameras everywhere and hollering, "See, he has autism!" As if the kid will ever have a normal life?
Frankly, I'm not even sure what autism is and if kids really have it or if they are just plain snotty brats? I did see the movie "Rain Man" and Tom Cruise's brother could do way hard math problems in his head, and count the number of matches that were spilled on the floor. I think he was autistic - or mentally retarded. It just seems like we have to invent new names that are less caustic than their predecessors.
I always thought ADHD (ADD?) was the illness-de-jour of the 90's and beyond? Personally, I always thought that parents who said their kid had ADD really didn't know what the hell they were talking about and that the kid was just being a kid. I still believe that. I think their little brains are fried with video games and sugar and since they can't slow down and concentrate on their social studies, parents just throw up their arms, and say, "ADD." When I was little, we didn't have fancy names to label children and create an immediate excuse for when they fail. When we failed in the 1960's, we failed. Now parents and society want to BLAME it on someone or something. The problem is that this sort of lame excuse-making places a stigma on the kid that he or she will fall back on for the rest of their lives.
I know this all sounds a tad blunt, but these labels are too easily and too readily applied to kids today and it will affect them for the rest of their lives. In most cases, I just believe it's lazy parenting.
We give trophies to the kid who finishes last. Teams can't cut anyone. When I coached baseball, and soccer the league instruction was that all the kids were required to play a reasonably equal amount of time. Winning wasn't a priority. As the late, great Vince Lombardi once said, "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." I don't know about you, but when I was a kid, we were allowed to fail. The prospect of failing made me work harder. Now? Not so much. Pathetic isn't it?
This bothers me.
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