Lyrics Today's Professional Parents - George Carlin

Today's Professional Parents

It’s all bullshit, and it’s bad for you.
Now, speaking of parents and speaking of bullshit, two ideas which aren’t always mutually exclusive, by the way.
I’d like to mention a special kind of bullshit that has taken hold in this country in the last 30 to 40 years.
It’s a form of bullshit that really only can be called child worship.
It’s child worship.
It’s this excessive devotion to children.
I’m talking about today’s professional parents, these obsessive diaper sniffers, who are over-scheduling and over-managing their children and robbing them of their childhoods.
Even the simple act of playing, even the simple act of playing has been taken away from children and put on mommy’s schedule in the form of play dates.
Something that should be spontaneous and free is now being rigidly planned.
When does a kid ever get to sit in the yard with a stick anymore?
You know, just sit there with a fucking stick.
Do today’s kids even know what a stick is?
You know.
You sit in the yard with a fucking stick and you dig a fucking hole.
You know.
Yeah.
And you look at the hole, and you look at the stick, and you have a little fun.
But kids don’t have sticks anymore.
I don’t think there are any sticks left.
I think they’ve all been recalled because of lead paint.
Who would have thought that one day the manufacturing of sticks would be outsourced to China?
But you know something, a kid shouldn’t be wasting his time with a stick anyway.
If he’s 4 years old, he should be home studying for his kindergarten entrance exams.
Do you know about that shit?
Oh, they have them now.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There are places that have kindergarten entrance exams.
The poor little fuck.
The poor little fuck, he can barely locate his dick, you know, and already he’s being pressured to succeed.
Pressured to succeed for the sake of the parents.
Isn’t this really just a sophisticated form of child abuse?
And speaking of that, speaking of child abuse.
Speaking of child abuse, next stop grade school.
Grade school where he won’t be allowed to play tag because it encourages victimization.
And he won’t be allowed to play dodge ball because it’s exclusionary, and it promotes aggression.
Standing around is still OK.
Standing around is still permitted, but it won't be for long because sooner or later some kid is going to be standing around, and his foot will fall asleep, and his parents will sue the school, and it'll be goodbye fucking standing
around.
Now… You know?
Now fortunately, all is not lost.
All is not lost because at least we know that when he does get to play, whatever games he is allowed to play, the child will never lose.
We know he’ll never lose because in today’s America no child ever loses.
There are no losers anymore.
Everyone’s a winner, no matter what the game or sport or competition, everybody wins.
Everybody wins.
Everybody gets a trophy.
No one is a loser.
No child these days ever gets to hear those all-important character building words, “You lost, Bobby.
You lost.
You’re a loser, Bobby.”
They miss out on that.
You know what they tell a kid who lost these days?
“You were the last winner.”
A lot of these kids never get to hear the truth about themselves until they’re in their 20’s when the boss calls them in and says, “Bobby, clean the shit out of your desk and get the fuck out of here.
You’re a loser.
Get the fuck out of here.”
Of course, Bobby’s parents can’t understand why he can’t hold a job.
In school, he was always on the honor roll.
Well, what they don’t understand, of course, is that in today’s schools, everyone is on the honor roll.
Everyone is on the honor roll because in order to be on the honor roll, all you really need to do is to maintain a body temperature somewhere roughly in the 90’s.
But we shouldn’t be worrying about how he’s doing in school because you know, come summertime, he’ll be off to camp.
Yes, he’ll be off to camp, but not to swim and hike and play softball.
No, no, no, no.
Today’s child will be sent away to lose weight.
He’ll be sent to fat camp or violin camp or ceramics camp or computer camp or leadership camp, whatever the fuck that is.
Leadership camp.
Isn’t that where Hitler went?
You know, uh… Specialized, structured summer camps.
Got to keep the little fucker busy, don’t they?
Got to keep the little fucker busy.
Wouldn’t want him to sneak in a little unstructured time in the woods.
That wouldn’t be any good.
God knows he might start jacking off.