Britney Spears' Mommy Manual

One of these days Britney Spears is going to get her kids back. I know it will happen, because I have watched a lot of Lifetime, and the mom always gets her kids back in the end, unless the father is Brian Austin Green (and I am telling you, K-Fed is no Brian Austin Green). And I also know that a lot of people are going to be really upset when Britney gets her kids back. They’ll say that no one who feeds her kids Cheetos and Diet Pepsi all day, and lets them stay up until all hours, and sometimes almost drops them on the ground after fashion shows, should be allowed to have custody of her kids. There will be a whole bunch of other people, Brit’s fans for example, who might argue, that the best place for little Sean Preston and Jayden James is with their mother (in her lap, in the front seat of her Mercedes, in the Taco Bell drive-thru).

If my 22 month old daughter were asked, she would likely agree with this group. In fact, if she were really pressed and she actually knew who Britney Spears is, she would probably call her an inspiration, a true parenting mentor. I mean my daughter and Britney Spears have such similar parenting styles, it sometimes seems as if my daughter might have Brit’s number in her fave five on her Hello Kitty plastic cell phone.

A few examples...

Let’s start with the most obvious thing - transportation. While my daughter can’t drive, Santa did bring her a pretty sweet toy stroller and she definitely doesn’t follow safety protocol when taking her babies around. I would say that the appropriate passenger limit for that stroller is two medium sized babies or maybe two smaller babies and a beanie baby. My daughter routinely crams five to ten of her babies in that stroller, sometimes, shoving larger babies on top of tiny ones and sometimes even throwing in dangerous animals like miniature plastic tigers and reindeer into the mix. Once I even saw her pushing four babies and the Hamburglar around in that thing- something about that just didn’t feel right, almost like she had locked her kids in the car with a sex predator. Except that her babies would never be locked in, because just like Brit, my daughter doesn’t believe in using child restraints when transporting her babies. The stroller came with a beautiful beaded seat belt, but my daughter prefers to disconnect the belt and use it to accessorize her own outfits.

On to food. It has been well documented that Britney has a down home girl’s love of junk food and she shares that with her kids whenever she can. It has been noted, mostly in places like US Weekly and various celeb blogs, that Britney has put pop in her boy’s bottles and let them snack on all sorts of gas station favorites like Cheetos and Doritos and Oreos. My daughter may have more limited access to junk food for her babies (she's stuck with whatever is in the fake pantry of her fake kitchen), but she seems to outdo Britney in this department. She feeds her babies nothing but ketchup all day long. Mostly the babies all have to share the same little red ketchup bottle - the tiniest ones sip from it, while the bigger ones are spoon fed ketchup (two shoved in the high chair at a time).

Just like Britney, my daughter struggles with her own nasty habits and addictions. And these struggles certainly impact her parenting choices. My daughter can be fully absorbed in taking care of her babies - putting them in their beds, singing them lullabies- and suddenly she will be overcome with an insurmountable urge to have her own pacifier in her mouth. Poor babies, she will stop whatever caretaking she is doing and discard them immediately. She will run, crazed, to her secret pacifier stash in her crib. If you try to stop her, or remind her that there is an appropriate time and place (bedtime) for her habit, she will become hysterical, sweeping everything in her path, you, her babies, her brothers legos, up in a fit of rage. If that isn’t an addiction, I don’t know what is.

Now let’s talk about bedfellows and male role models. Everyone knows that father figures are important for babies. I think its pretty safe to say that Britney has struggled with giving her boys a consistent, male role model. I mean K-Fed may have stepped up his game in the last nine months, but it was only AFTER Britney went completely over the edge that he really took on his whole fatherhood gig. Britney is always paired up with a different boy and sometimes she can’t even make it through the weekend with the same date. The most consistent, reliable bedfellow my daughter has ever had is a red monster who’s in show business. That doesn’t sound like a role model to me.

And there’s more… At one point a former nanny asserted that Brit doesn’t even like to actually do anything with her kids. She just dresses them up and looks at them for a while and then has the nanny come and take them away when she is tired of them. My daughter does the same thing, she changes a few diapers, maybe trades around pants from baby to baby and redistributes their blankets. But when my daughter tires of her babies, she doesn’t call the nanny, instead she just drops them, abandons them right there, half-naked and clearly hungry for their ketchup.

I’ve seen the way my daughter's friends treat their babies. I can’t help but wonder if they’ve all taken a page from the Britney Spears' Mommy Manual (not to be confused with the book that Lynne Spears, Brit’s mom, was recently said to be working on). One of my daughter’s friends even left a baby at our house and never noticed. Don’t worry, my daughter gets a lot of advice from Angelina Jolie too, so she adopted it.

I’m not saying Britney Spears is a good mother with a bad rap. I’m just saying that there are probably a lot of other little mommies whose parenting skills are pretty similar. And those mommies aren’t wearing underwear either.