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Tween Concerns

After she had brushed her teeth and was ready for bed, J remembered something she had forgotten to tell me. All conversations in this vein particularly when is she sleepy, begin in the middle. She does not care to provide any context and dives right in. It is up to me to connect the dots and make what I can of it. "There are this girl in fifth grade who said this morning Justin Bieber is hot" J said.

The point of this anecdote from what I could tell was the use of the word hot in the context of a boy - a turn of phrase J was previously unfamiliar with. Clearly, she had caught the drift of what the fifth grader had implied but did not agree with her assessment. Yet J felt all grown up in having learned a novel use for the word hot and wanted to share that with me.

I ofcourse had no idea who Justin Bieber was and assumed it was a kid in her school. "So do you think he is hot too ?" I asked J as I did the dishes and she said "I think he's more dumb than hot." I was about to tell her something about not being judgmental when she asked that I look this guy up online. So I did and became aware that the kid in question was a pop singer from Canada. "Do you think he is hot ?" J asked me.

Comes a time in a mother's life when her eight year old learns that hot equals cute and attractive and that someone else's standards don't match hers. I guess it gets only more complicated from here on out.
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