This is Why We Started Fabulosokids™

I don’t know who is making softlines decisions over at JC Penny, but what I am sure of is that they need to be relieved of their position. For those of you who don’t know, JC Penney had the sweatshirt pictured at right as part of their back to school assortment which, thanks to groups inlcuding 7wonderlicious, has now been pulled from the shelves. When I learned about it, all I could think was “This is Why We Started Fabulosokids™.” (For more about our philosophy, read this and this.”

What’s the Big Deal?

There are lots of issues. First of all, the slogan implies that there is something romantically attractive about a girl not doing homework. Second, the shirt sends the message to girls that their true key to success is not hard work but physical beauty. (Later, that standard will be transformed in many girls’ minds into the idea that sexual desirability or perhaps availability are their tickets to advancement and acceptance.) Third, the shirt makes light of the value of education, alluding to the incorrect assumption that school is simply something to be suffered through. Fourth, it speaks to a growing sense that teens and preteens should openly defy adult direction. Fifth, it further degrades the value placed on personal responsibility in our country and encourages children to shift the burden of their own problems and responsibilities onto others.

All of those things are despicable in and of themselves. Whoever designed the graphics should be ashamed of themselves, as should the executive who signed off on its inclusion in the back to school assortment. It is ideas like the ones emblazoned upon the shirt, and the attitudes that define and are defined by them, that are eating like termites at our country and leaving only an empty husk of debt and mediocrity and dependence and entitlement. We must not accept such things, and we must not allow ourselves to think it’s alright for our children to accept them either.

The Cancer of Negativity 

This is why we started Fabulosokids™. These kinds of products become available every once in a while and, for reasons that Gloria and I cannot understand, are embraced by the public at large. There have been lots of them. The window stickers of boys peeing on various things. The “I’m with Stupid” t-shirts that couples were fond of wearing for a time. The “Mommy’s Little Monster” bibs and pajamas that were available for infants. Each and every one of us has a choice. We can choose to buy such products and give root to the cancer of negativity, or we can reject it.

And these things, these products and sayings and language choices–all of them are negativity despite what we have convinced ourselves of. We see them as jokes or as hyperbole, and they may be at first. But soon, after we have worn an “I’m with Stupid” T-shirt, calling the people who we love “stupid” seems not so harsh and soon after that, we may begin to believe it or worse, they may begin to believe it. Like cancer, negativity starts as something even less than a thought and, by the time it can be seen with the naked eye, has grown and metastacized into something that we never thought that it, or we, would become and something that we have no means by which to excise from ourselves.

Why didn’t JC Penney choose to merchandise a shirt that said “I’m pretty and I’m smart.” It is no more arrogant nor belligerent than the one that they did choose to put out for sale. Can you imagine what the future for women would be like if we could teach an entire generation of girls that there is value in treating both their appearances and their minds as assets to be cultivated? Right now, we do so only in terms of fantasy–the hot professor who all the boys love to be in class with–and which we all seem to acknowledge is funny or charming because we believe it’s impossible? Why are beauty and intellect mutually exclusive?

Fabulosokids™ Was Started to Generate Positivity

Instead of perpetuating myths and cultivating negativity in our children, shouldn’t we all be trying to foster positivity in them? I certainly don’t mean to ignore or to avoid those things which are negative–to the contrary, seek them out and teach you children how to react to them from a foundation of positivity. Build that foundation by being positive yourself and by squelching any tendencies that they may have to be negative, and foster that positivity by constantly reinforcing their positively oriented behavior.

This is why we started Fabulosokids™. To give people a means by which to choose something other than the kinds of messages that are generally available, a place to choose messages and images of positivity, and to begin to refocus the minds of our children so that optimism and happiness once again become the norm.

©2011 Fabulosokids™ LLC All rights reserved.