by Julia Prescott

It started simple enough: baby t-shirts with cute phrases like, “ABCD” in a super “metal” font, facebook photos with kids in sculpted mohawks fumbling their fingers into a “rock on” gesture; we all laughed, loved, forwarded the photos and were eager to keep ‘em comin’. Because it’s an empirical truth that anything adult-related crammed into a baby-like size is adorable (like picnic wine), and sometimes hilarious (like Tom Cruise), these were all welcomed gestures and signs of a new tomorrow.

But what this trickled toward, the excess of baby hipster-dom, of parent-imposed indie music taste, and treating the children of the current generation like Zooey Deschanel and Ben Gibbard finger puppets takes a toll that’s gone way too far. And I’m here to stop it.

That’s right America, I see you with your 4-year old in a button down and matching cardigan with thick Buddy Holly glasses and I will not ask you what your child’s name is – because I’m a fan of Game of Thrones and I can only guess what hippie Medieval bullshit title you’ve given him, and I hope to God it isn’t Melisandre or anything Baratheon.

When I was in 2^nd grade I had no idea who Gwen Stefani was, or what a “Joe Strummer” could have been. I was a pastel-wearing, messy-bangs clad, gaucho pants-sporting little girl – and even the faintest sensibility of what punk rock was, or what were the most influential indie movies of that time had no business being in my little girl head.

It would be years until I crept upon something society deemed as “cool,” and even longer before I considered myself the faintest degree of being “hip.” This was an adolescent era of clambering for whatever shred of popular culture you could include into your identity – the bands you listened to directly dictated who you were to the world, and the most obscure, under-appreciated, and indie of them all – the better you looked as an appreciator of that.

It was hard to prove to your Middle School peers that you in fact had dodged the dork bullet and transitioned into the “hip kid” category. This process would take a full dedication of scanning cool magazines for clothes ideas, wandering through record stores if only to listen to whatever album they played on the loud speaker (and chances are, it was Sublime’s, “40 oz. of Freedom” and even then that was so last year), talking a big game to your pee-wee contemporaries the Monday after a “crazy weekend” (Your cousin came in from out of town and you put your beds together and made a trundle fort. The End.) 

Now when I look at little kids dressed in smart sweaters, hip t-shirts, with a hairstyle more expensive and cooler than I can afford with the income from my “adult job”, a sting of unfairness is too overwhelming to accurately report.

If I met these babies when I was a baby, there’s no way in hell I would wanna share my Legos with them. They’re the epitome of douche-y without being able to even articulate such a word. And their parents think they’re doing some kind of public service or interpersonal justice to their cool offspring by clothing them in Urban Outfitters Winter collection. That’s the worst part.

Is providing for the children of our future with an overinflated sense of importance, and a boundary-less living space what’s going to poison them – or will it be the tweed overcoat they’re wearing with a button from the “The Blow” concert their parents attended last weekend?

The irony to me is that the appearance of adult-like growth from these toddlers in their adult-like clothes is in fact stunting their development. If they’re given the keys to the cool castle, and are having their minds pumped with scours of Coachella line-ups from the past 5 years, chances are they won’t find the struggle or desperation held in the back of Amoeba Records when a 13-year old Julia is frantically trying to find an album that the guy behind the counter at the check-out won’t make fun of.   

What will they do when they don’t have the experience of showing up to school on a Monday with your hair freshly clipped into what you perceive to be a “Natalie Imbruglia” chop of feminine worldliness, when in fact it makes others question your biological gender (a ‘Natelie Im-dudelia, if you will – I’ll just collect my comedy check right now).

What will they do? – absolutely nothing. The experience of feeling less than the average kid, the nervousness that is biologically coupled with asking out someone to a concert, the daily angst that continues to give me pangs of anxiety to this day from simply being 14 years old at one point in my life will be lost on this generation, the “Vampire Weekend” generation, the “YouTube Your Feelings” generation, the end of civilization as we Instagram it.

I’d like to think there’s a silver lining – that one day we’ll allow kids to be kids in their full tie-dyed, pastel, messy-haired and orange-colored braces puddle of weirdness. Perhaps the current cool kid generation will be phased out, harkening the next. By this time baby pea coats and baby Toms shoes will have worn out its welcome on the young hipster parents of day’s past, future kids will be free to wear over-alls, mismatched shoes, and neon shirts with “Radical” emblazoned across the front.

Or perhaps the “classic kid look” will just be the “new hip kid look”. Sort of like the vinyl of adolescent fashion. Either way, I can deal with it.  Just as long as “Stacy” and “Max” become the new “Salladhor” and “Matthos”.