Prostitution, the Governor and our kids
-
- March
- 11
Eliot Spitzer, and his apology for an activity he is yet to name, did not come up at my house last night.          Now that could mean the kids didn’t know about it because the news broke too late in the school day to become gossip there. And then they went home to the Nintendo Wii, which was still filling the house with the sounds of a furious jungle fire fight when I got home.         On the other hand, maybe they knew but were were too busy torturing each other and their parents to raise the subject.           In any case that gives me time to think about what to say when this conversation does play out. As I write this, I have no idea what to say, but that’s OK.  In a little while, I’m going to be one of several reporters here working on a story about how parents plan to talk to their kids on this very subject.          That’s a great thing about this job: not just talking to folks about big news – whether it’s the shooting of John Lennon, or September 11 and its aftermath – but listening to them trying to make sense of the events. Even if a lot of the time it doesn’t.          After listening to some of the morning radio shows today – and the trashy level of  discussions there –  it’s clearly a good idea to have that conversation with your kids. What are you going to say? Â
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on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 11:41 am by Len Maniace.
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My 9-year-old noticed the headline on the Times this morning as I read the paper and asked “What did the governor do?” I told him that he cheated on his wife. “You can get a story about you in the paper for cheating on your wife?” he asked. Well, not really, I told him. I explained that he paid another woman, who wasn’t his wife, to be his girlfriend. My son seemed to get the gravity of that and said simply, “Oh. That’s bad.” Then I showed him a photo of David Paterson and said “This man could be the next governor of New York,” to which my son, mouth agape, said, “He’s black? Like us?” And from there we continued to talk about the achievements of African Americans in politics. So it turned out to be a good conversation after all. Not sure that child development folks would say this was the best way to handle it, but it worked for us.
Tangie,
Sounds to me like that was handled pretty well, on both ends of the conversation. Thank you for reading and writing. Please do so, again.
Len
Tangie,
That was a very good lesson for you son. The lesson about the lack of barriers to high office is just as important as the lesson about marital infidelity. No child should grow up thinking that he/she can’t aspire to high level achievement due to extraneous factors like race.