Parental Guidance Recommended

Looking at this photo makes me feel tired. And like life just gets more repulsive with each whim of every precocious child being catered to by its unfulfilled parent. Yeah, yeah, I know – Noah Cyrus mightn’t be precocious (much) and her parents mightn’t be attempting to re-live their own youth through their children (at all) … but, for God’s sake. Knee high boots and a face full of makeup? For a posed photo opportunity at a public event? Halloween aside, get a grip. She’s nine – does she really need to be flooding the internet alongside the search term ‘dominatrix’?

I don’t want to start up the ‘kids are growing up too fast’ moral panic train – I don’t have the energy for starters and I am all too aware it’s the job of every generation to lament their successors. I’m not here to impinge my knee-high-boot free childhood on Noah Cyrus, or indeed her parents (seriously, who are her parents and what happened to them to make this vision a reality?) Consequently I’m going to try and avoid the ‘when I was nine, I was furnishing a decrepit shack in the back paddock with old furniture stolen from the stable attic and the assistance of my best friends and a chain,’ or ‘at that age I was swimming about the pool like a fish and playing backyard cricket.’ I mean I was, but I was also wearing a fur coat and red lipstick at the local eisteddfod, so, you know, everything in moderation. And I’m sure I got hold of some dastardly, forgotten 80s make up of my mother’s and smeared it on my face for whatever reason – a play or dance routine perhaps -  and I certainly wore a touch of it for ballet recitals, and loved it. Kids do all sorts of things for fun and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with most of it (frying ants with a magnifying class is an exception).

When various media outlets attempted to whip everyone into a frenzy about Suri Cruise wearing miniature heels out and about, I sat, un-frenzied for the exact aforementioned reasons. As someone who has been a female child with a sister and numerous female friends, and as someone who has nannied a heel-fancying child for years, I am familiar with what we tend to do as kids. Imitate, want to be like Mum, want to play games, make-believe, all of that. Occasionally a novelty heel is part of that and wedging our feet into them is most often of our own volition. I rolled my eyes when said nannying charge pranced into the room wearing mini mules. She took them off when she was sick of them (and discovered they weren’t advantageous in bike riding) as I’d imagine Suri did – as, thanks to various trashy websites, I’m fairly sure Suri did too.

We all did funny, weird, questionable things as kids, things because of and in spite of our gender and the moral codes our parents were trying to instill in us. We all tried to be grown ups before our time and usually wiped it off sometime between bath-time and dinner. Being ‘like mum’ or ‘like Dad’ and attempting to do or say or be things that aren’t age appropriate isn’t unusual. It’s actually a pretty healthy part of our development. It’s just that most of us had parents to laugh and say ‘oh isn’t that funny, now go and take off the lipstick and play outside’ or words to that effect. Basically we had someone to take this part of our childhood experimentation and point it in the right direction – not capitalise on it for money, publicity or the advancement of our mini careers. Noah Cyrus, I daresay, doesn’t. Otherwise she probably wouldn’t have been at Jamie Lee Curtis’s heavily photographed Halloween party and ended up on websites all over the internet looking like that.

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