total attitude

My daughter Kate has this t-shirt that she bought at a flea market. The girls and I were holidaying with my sister's family and our parents at the cabin, and my dad gave the kids each some change to spend. Kate couldn't read at the time, and yet somehow she managed to pick out the one item that really personified her. It's a black t-shirt with some sparkles and stars, a don't mess with me tinkerbell, and the words "total attitude"printed across it. Anyway, I hadn't seen it for awhile and then she pulled it out the other day and asked me to clarify what it said for her. So the next day I'm at my oldest daughter Elizabeth's soccer game, standing in the rain and the wind with a couple other brave souls, and somehow we get talking about our daughters and what attitude they all seem to have already. So I asked why? Why do they have such attitude, where do you think it comes from? Did we have attitude when we were eight? One of the other moms said she figures it's the TV that does it. We all agreed, sure, it seems like all the shows have nothing but kids who are cute smart asses quipping clever one liners to the laugh track while the parents look like defeated buffoons. This must be why our girls all have such attitude. The eye rolling, the foot stomping, the  back talking etc.
So later on that day I started to think about the shows that I did watch when I was my daughters ages of seven and eight. The first two that came to mind were The Waltons and Little House on The Prairie. Now, I was sick for a couple months last fall, and was trapped in my bedroom for most of it with not much I could do. I have never been a daytime TV watcher, but with nothing else to pass the time with ( I had really bad headaches so it was hard to even read a book for a while) I started flipping through the channels. It was shocking to me how little there was that remotely appealed to me to watch. Then one day I came across an ancient rerun of The Waltons. I mention all this so I can say that I have actually recently watched the show, and am not commenting on it through years gone by nostalgic glasses, so to speak. And in all honesty, as wholesome etc as the show was, I have to admit that those three daughters had some pretty major attitude going on at times too. That Mary Ellen was a real drama queen, and there was definitely some whining and eye rolling going on, not to mention some real back talking by Erin and Elizabeth as well. And then there was Little House. Hmmm. When you really think about it, wasn't the whole series just a never ending show down between Laura and Nellie? Laura was constantly running off and disobeying Michael Landon, and was always in trouble at school, and Nellie, well come on, she was the original TV girl diva. There was no one on TV with more attitude than Nellie! Her parents had absolutely no control over her, she was rude and spoiled and didn't we just live to see what kind of trouble she and Laura would get into next?
So, it would seem that we are just turning into our own parents, moaning about how things were so different when we were kids, when really perhaps they really weren't after all. Maybe it's just part of being a girl, and it happens like this everywhere, throughout history. I find this to be a comforting thought, because it just means my kids are "normal", for what it's worth. I guess it's also explains why my mother just laughs under her breath at times when I complain to her about the latest mother daughter tug of war in my house. I suspect she would just call it something like retribution, or getting my just desserts, and I further suspect she would be right!