Letting A Child Listen To P!nk Is Not Bad Parenting, But Going To Court Over It Is
On the list of things that make a person a bad parent, allowing a child to listen to P!nk is very low on the list. I adore P!nk, so I would personally say that allowing a kid to listen to P!nk is much better parenting than not allowing a kid to listen to P!nk. But both definitely are several rungs down the “bad parenting” ladder from making one’s child go through a lengthy and messy legal battle over whether or not P!nk counts as bad parenting.
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According to Jezebel, a US judge seriously had to rule that taking a child to a P!nk concert did not count as bad parenting. A father in New Jersey filed the complaint two years ago on the grounds that his ex-wife was “abusing her parental discretion” by taking their then-11-year-old daughter to a P!nk concert. The father insisted that the mother was a bad parent because the P!nk concert could have “traumatized” the 11-year-old, and because P!nk is “sexually suggestive.”
The mother reportedly told the judge that she had been hesitant about the appropriateness of the concert, but she had looked up clips from the tour on YouTube and judged them to be age-appropriate for her 11-year-old, who was “dying to go.”
The show took place in 2013 in Newark and was an all-ages show. P!nk has been known to sometimes cut profanity out of her songs during concerts when she knows there are children in the audience, but it is unclear whether or not that was the case at the Newark show.
For his part, family court judge Lawrence R. Jones said, “so what.” In a 37-page ruling, he referenced Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan in a brief history of rock and roll and said that P!nk was not necessarily inappropriate music for an adolescent girl.
“Her decision did not subject the child to any unreasonable risk of harm, or compromise [the girl’s] health, safety or welfare,” Jones wrote. “To the contrary, when all the smoke from the custody litigation clears, it will be self-evident that all which happened here is that a young girl went to her first rock concert with her mother and had a really great time.”
Jones actually had to interview the girl away from her parents for his ruling. While the judge ruled that she was more than mature enough to attend a P!nk concert with her mother, it certainly seems like there is an example of “bad parenting” at work in this case. But the guilty party is the one who dragged his 11-year-old daughter into a messy, protracted court case because he disagreed with her mother about a rock concert.
Photo: WENN
