Sunday, June 25, 2006

Munchausen Thinks of the Children

I can’t actually foretell the future, of course, but sometimes I can look at a kid and just know his life’s going to suck. Like that baby I saw being pushed in a stroller a few months ago: mom’s a chain-smoking teenage Goth chick who dressed her infant child in a black T-shirt that says I SUCK TITTY. The whole scene was sickeningly funny, but still I felt bad for the kid.

And also for one in this Christian Science Monitor article about parents who use various spy programs to keep track of their children’s online activities. Now, I understand that parents these days must worry about the potential for their kids to get in trouble online, and I think it's great that the parents in the story are handling the problem themselves rather than run screaming to the government to do something.

This parent, however, deserves to have her children write nasty books about her and eventually stick her in one of those horrible nursing homes they show on earnest public-television exposés:

Carolina Aitken, a mom in Santa Rosa, Calif., took her two teenage sons on the Dr. Phil show after she exposed their Internet misuse. She had contacted them via e-mail as "Candy Sweetness," a fictitious 16-year-old girl, to see if she could get them to give up their home phone number. One did.

If you ask Mom I’m sure she’ll say she went on TV to protect America’s children. Anyway, after the show the family finagled a write-up in their local newspaper:

Carolina Aitken of Humboldt County will be on the “Dr. Phil” show later this month.
In an e-mail to the Times-Standard, her husband Don Aitken wrote: “My wife wrote a letter to the Dr. Phil show in early March and was contacted by the Dr. Phil show April 9 and invited to appear on stage with Dr. Phil as a guest. The show then sent a film crew to our home in Loleta and spent the day filming and interviewing for the show.”
The couple was then flown down to Hollywood, where Carolina Aitken and her children appeared with the show's namesake, Phil McGraw, on stage at the Paramount lot.


Flown down to Hollywood! On stage with Dr. Phil! My oh my, the girls at the Canasta Club will just be pea-green, won’t they?

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

In a similar vein to Gothmom, I have the following to offer:

Several months ago a group of us ended up in a local ice cream store to top off an already good meal.

Into the store walks Mom- chain smoking, and with a hairdo that came out of a FryDaddy.

Close at hand was her spawn; a little five year old boy in a green tank-top and with the most meticulously maintained mullet I have *ever* seen. We're talking a Kentucky Waterfall, David-Spade-as-Joe-Dirt-Perfect mullet.

After we all got our ice cream and left the establishment, a friend made the most succinctly appropriate description of this child:

"Poor little bastard."

8:44 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'll posit that bringing your child onto the Dr. Phil show is more abusive than smoking around him or dressing him like an idiot.

11:14 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Their town is named Loleta? I hope they don't have any daughters.

7:46 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Gee...what horny teenager won't give up his home phone number to a 16-year-old girl?

9:04 AM  

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