Thirty- something speaks
What's a hooker, Daddy?

Mike Maddock

For some reason my nine- year- old daughter said the word "hooker" the other day. I'm not exactly sure why she said it. She may have been describing the way she pinned something to her book bag, or she was calling one of her friends a hooker because this particular friend liked to hook things to her own book bag. I don't know. Like most conversations in my house, I only caught a portion of it.

My wife looked at me after the word came out of my child's mouth, and we both kind of chuckled under our breaths. We knew better than to laugh, but sometimes it's kind of hard to resist. The problem is that my daughter is in one of those super curious stages. If anything she says remotely catches our attention (positive, negative, or otherwise) she immediately turns into Mike Wallace and grills us relentlessly.

"What?" she asks. "What did I say? Why are you laughing? Are you laughing at hooker? What does hooker mean?"

My wife tried to sweep this particular incident under the proverbial rug and said, "Honey, just don't say that word. You don't need to worry about what it means."

This kind of direction worked well when she was four, because she trusted us implicitly and her attention span was about as short as she was. A Barbie doll could easily rescue us from any uncomfortable topic of conversation. That doesn't work any more.

So we had two options. We either completely ignore her and pray she forgets to ask one of her more worldly friends on the playground, or we could just be honest and tell her a hooker is a single- masted fishing smack used off the coast of Ireland. Hey, that's what it says in the dictionary! Of course, then she'd wonder what all the fuss was about.

We chose option one and furiously tried to change the subject. I don't know if she got educated on the playground or not, but my wife and I were prepared to take that chance. We've opted to keep our kids children as long as humanly possible, which is a hard thing to do these days. It's not going to get any easier either.

A lot of parents probably think we're weird, and that we're doing our kids a disservice by not exposing them to more and explaining to them the ways of the world. They may even think that when our little bubble we've kept our kids in bursts our kids won't be prepared for the "real world."

The real world isn't all it's cracked up to be though. I learned all I needed to know by the third grade, and I can't say I'm a better person for it. In fact, I know I could have lived without some of that information for the rest of my life. They don't call ignorance blissful for nothing. Childhood is so short. We've got plenty of time to learn the seedier elements of society, and if my kids get a rude awakening a little later in life then I'll just have to take that chance. They're going to be mad at me for something, right? I'd rather they be mad at me for keeping them children than for taking their childhood.

So if my daughter grows up, fishes off the coast of Ireland and asks for a hooker, she may get a chuckle, but she can ask someone else why they're laughing.