Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank Read Online Free PDF

had been before.
    Today’s students, say the Hulk, don’t know that you shouldn’t never end a sentence with a preposition. A way we used to remember this was to gently correct “Where you at?” with “Behind the preposition at.” Hey, this is what passed for snappy rejoinder back in the day. It would also get us beat up if said to the wrong person. (“Now where you at? On the ground, that’s where!”)
    The most important advice the experts have is to get kids to start reading more. I believe it’s already working. Just lastweek, I saw at least a half dozen sunscreened nine-year-olds sitting around a pool reading the latest Harry Potter book.
    While their parents pleaded with them to come swim, they waved them away without even looking up except to ask them please not to splash page 4,016 again.
    So as you can see, there’s lots of hope for a new generation of great writers.
    The hope dwindles as the little puddin’s get older, though. In a recent survey, more U.S. teens could name the Three Stooges than the three branches of the federal government, which, as those of us old enough to recall high school civics classes know to be the the legislative, the executive, and the Moe.
    It’s very trendy to whine about how little our young adults know about government. How many times have we seen teens draw a blank when asked to name this great nation’s vice president or, for that matter, the prime minister of Kansas?
    Teens today are not dumb. Quite the contrary. They have even invented their own language, an abbreviated sort of speech that allows them to chat back and forth on their cell phones using symbols and letters that cannot be deciphered by anyone old enough to remember mood rings.
    Thus,
I’m looking forward to seeing you again soon
(which, now that I write it, has all the appeal of sitting in the parlor and listening to 78s on the family Victrola) becomes simply
ltr.
    I’m not so sure this is a gd thg. Still, you must applaud today’s young people for their technological savvy. Most can download an entire library of music in less time than it takes me to pit my prunes.
    I believe we will see a nation in which Speaker of the House Jack Osbourne will say, “All we want is some frickin’ respect. Buttholes.”
    But, dear Jack, respect must be earned. Those who refuse to remember the mistakes of the past are doomed to end up on shows like
I’m a Celebrity
—
Get Me Outta Here!
    What I’m saying is that it’s possible to be cool and to know a little bit about history. If you ask a teen today to locate Vietnam on a map, there is not a doubt in my mind that he will say, “I dunno, dawg, but I’m pretty sure it’s one of the blue ones.”
    Young people today have an abysmal knowledge of geography. They can’t recall the names of the continents (and, hey, nobody’s perfect—I almost always forget Chile).
    So what’s the solution to a nation filled with young people who honestly believe that Springfield is home to Bart Simpson, not Abraham Lincoln?
    The return of civics classes (which, by law, must be taught by the same guy who teaches driver’s ed
and
dates the homely but kind school librarian)?
    Mayhaps. Otherwise, and I hate to say this, we may be looking at a future that includes two words that should never, ever be put together: President Britney.
    While it’s easy to act as if we grown-ups have all the answers, we don’t. Witness what happened when I tried to help my second-grader with a science project.
    Scrambling into the backseat of the car at the end of school, she paused long enough to look me in the eye. Was that disgust I saw in the eyes of my precious?
    “You’re fired!” she growled with a dismissive flick of her hand. All that was missing was the famous Trump hair turban.
    Okay, so I “helped” her with a couple of school projects and they didn’t go so well. It was late, the project was overdue, and who really cares if a sea turtle is a mammal or a rodent or whatever,