Reply #4: thank you for the link, [View All]

I started to read that article on a plane months ago, but it was a really short flight. (ottawa-toronto)

I like to think that the young women in my family are "normal" and their all born and raised in the youth self-destruction capital of the world, Orange County. I think much of it is encouraging non-conformity at a young age, and by non-conformity I don't mean what is marketed as non-conformity as in blue hair, nose rings and goth music.

And for lack of a better description, a sense of judgement, virtue and morality. I know it is supposed to be so bad to be judgemental, but if a young girl is getting the impression she might be superior in some way to a girl who dresses like a prostitute, that might not be a bad thing.

I saw a child getting scolded recently in a mall after she pointed at a girl in the food court and said "she looks dirty" well that was a pretty apt description of the individual in question, she looked like she just wandered in after a night of turning tricks on the Sunset Strip!

The mother scolded her daughter and told her never to judge people by how they look and that girls can dress however they like and that when she is a big girl she can dress like that too!

What kind of lesson is that?

If I had a young daughter and she was expressing judgements of that sort, we would be stopping at every toy store in the mall and ice cream serving establishment on the way home.

Society has taken on the attitude that having any personal sense of self worth or a strive for any level of sophistication is elitist and that if you have a personal standards better than those of say Kevin Federline - you are an uptight prude.

A child with a personal sense of disgust at certain behavior will be more immune to peer pressure and less likely to comprimise for approval than a child who has been told for years that there is nothing wrong with it and is pineing for the approval of that ground.

So those are my thoughts as a thirty something man with a whole flock of young female relatives.