Posted June 24 2008
A Bubble Of A World
While at work, and in dire need of entertainment, my friend sent me a link to a restaurant review and urged me to look down to comment #25. Comment #25 was posted by a woman wanting to know if this is a good place for her to bring her children for dinner in the city. I immediately though “Of course” until I continued to read… She stated that her kids “have not been exposed to public displays of affection or immodest dress in kosher places and [she] would like to keep it that way.” Excuse me, but….what? I understand the theory of shielding your child from inappropriate things (I shield my little sister from many inappropriate things) but to completely shun everything that doesn’t fit into the mold of what you believe is going a little bit overboard.
Growing up, my parents shielded me from many things such as inappropriate movies, TV shows and songs that were not appropriate for a girl my age, but they did not close my eyes when someone walked down the street dressed inappropriately or put their hands over my ears when someone in the vicinity spoke of things inappropriate for my age. Attending Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women, I was astounded that some of the girls there had no idea what AIDS or HIV was and they were petrified for their lives from this “new disease” that they could contract. The amount that these girls were shielded and the fears instilled in them for the unknown and the different saddened me because they will never truly understand how the world works or why people make the decisions they do, rather they will only understand the world created for them in the bubble they have been placed.
One person responded to this woman stating that if she really wants to shield her children, she should not bring them into New York City, the place where—as Sex and the City put it, we embrace public urination and men dressing as women—yet she should only let them out of the house for shul and school. Is that something that should be done?
When a child sees something they have never seen before, they embrace it, touch every part of it, put it in their mouths, and allow every single one of their senses experience it. When a more mature person experiences something they have never experienced before, they decide whether or not they enjoy the experience and if they do, attempt to duplicate it as much as possible, no matter who tells them that it is wrong.
In my opinion, and you are free to disagree with me, what a child sees and experiences should be censured, however they should understand what is there and why they are being kept from it, otherwise when they do, they are at the mercy of temptation for the unknown.
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I agree with you Tiff. I think it becomes a problem when children have blinders on for everything until they are older. By not talking to our children about issues, it only makes them want to explore them more, and usually via a method that parents would not like even more. Not only that, we have children who run off to Yeshiva in Israel or college here in America, and never had a drink of alcohol until they arrive, or never discuss issues of sex (can I even say that on here with all the censoring out there??) and then once taken off the leash their parents had on them, dive head in first. There needs to be a way for parents to have open dialogue with their children so that the excitement of being independent does not cause a child to go experiment too much. Shielding children from what u don’t want them to see or experience does not make them not see it, nor not experience it.