Adam Carolla - Daddy, Stop Talking! - And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

Our whole culture is catered to kids and their happiness now. I really noticed this recently when I saw the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards . We have a whole awards show dedicated to what kids care about? You know what adults shouldn’t care about? What kids care about. I saw a parade of A-list celebrities at this show getting green slime dumped on them and thought, “What have we become?” Seriously, this show gets big stars. Mark Wahlberg, Sandra Bullock, Will Smith and Harrison Ford have all been covered in green slime. Can you imagine Robert Mitchum or Humphrey Bogart doing this? Fuck, no. They’d be on stage in front of an audience full of kids smoking, swirling some Cutty Sark in a rocks glass and telling an unapologetically racist joke about Rhianna.

This appealing to kids at all times has now stepped out of the world entertainment and into politics. Every senator and congressman is on Twitter and has an Instagram account, which is supposed to help them stay in touch with their youth constituency but really just ends up being their downfall when they get caught sending dick pics to an intern. Even President Obama went on Zach Galifianakis’s Web series, Between Two Ferns, to talk about Obamacare. Nothing against Zach or his show, but I certainly hope the president would prioritize his time better than doing a comedy bit with the guy from The Hangover . But Barack had to do that gig. He couldn’t expect young people to educate themselves on an issue or to seek out information; he had to show up where they already were to spoon-feed it to them.

So aiming everything at people under eighteen has already ruined movies, music and now politics, but what’s killing me is that it’s now creeping into the sacred realm of sports. I’m not going to even get into the head-injury issue and how it is going to be the end of Pop Warner football. I think the “protect the kids” mentality has crept in in an even more insidious way.

A few years ago while everyone in the media was talking about the Richie Incognito bullying story, I thought the bigger and more egregious example of pussifying sports was the Red Sox World Series celebration. When they all went into the locker room to party, David Ortiz, Big Papi, a two-hundred-fifty-pound home-run hitter and the biggest guy on the team, wore a snow-boarding helmet and ski goggles because there was Champagne flying. Can you believe what’s going on? We can’t even have a Champagne-spray victory celebration without protective gear because someone might get a detached retina.

The novelty of shaking up Champagne and spraying it on a guy goes away if he’s wearing a slicker, goggles and a hat. It’s no fun spraying your teammate with Champagne if he’s dressed like a deckhand on an Alaskan crab boat.

And the entire locker room was covered in plastic, too. It looked like the front row of a Gallagher concert. You just won the World Series, Red Sox. I’m sure you can hire some folk to clean up the mess the next day. Again, it ruins the fun. This is the equivalent of egging your principal’s house while it’s tented for fumigation.

And was there an incident to provoke this? Did Carl Yastrzemski die from an errant Champagne cork? Did some Veuve Clicquot in the eye end Steve Garvey’s career? Where’s the bravery in sports? These guys are supposed to be larger than life heroes we look up to. Bottom line: I want to watch a guy being interviewed while his teammates do a Champagne golden shower on his hair, not his helmet.

It’s not just the wussiness in sports that’s killing our kids, they’re getting softened up everywhere because our whole culture is overshadowed by the threat of liability and lawsuits. I was in New York not too long ago doing some gigs and decided to hit the gym in the hotel. There was that big sign on the wall with the usual list of things not to do. Among the “No Smoking” and “No Eating” (as if someone chugging away on an elliptical machine is going to bust out a fondue pot) was “No Horseplay.”

Seriously, Marriott, “No Horseplay”? Are you that afraid someone might sue you? I don’t think this would hold up in court. I ask you, reader, how many times have you heard a study on the news about this or heard the surgeon general talk about the epidemic of horseplay-related deaths? None. And furthermore, I’d argue that anyone young enough to engage in horseplay wouldn’t even know what horseplay is. (For those of you who don’t know, horseplay is a disgusting porn genre. The man gets on all fours… perhaps I’ve revealed too much.)

This kind of overly cautious mentality is everywhere today, and it’s destroying our kids. Sonny and Natalia came home from school one day in 2012 and I asked them about their day and more specifically what they did at recess. Sonny told me that they had a “walking recess.” I had no idea what that was. We certainly didn’t have them when I was a kid. He clued me in that a walking recess is one in which there is no running, no balls to kick around and designated “cool zones.” It was September, so it was pretty hot, but not scorching. It was in the low eighties. When I was in school, I would have been doing two-a-days and being denied water the entire time. But my kids are sitting in cool zones probably talking about their various nut and legume allergies. Dear schools: Your pussifying my kid with your cool zones is not cool.

We’ve gone nuts with the sunscreen. When the kids had just turned five there was one night they wanted to go take a dip in the pool. They came up to me at around five forty-five in the evening asking to go swimming. I said sure, and told them to go put on their bathing suits. They quickly came down in their swimming gear and as we started to head outside Sonny doubled back, panic stricken. “Daddy, what about sunscreen?” I told him that the sun had gone behind the house and there was no need. There was literally a shadow cast across the pool from the house. Sonny could not deal with this. He insisted he was going to need some sunscreen. I said no, and that it was a waste of time and he should head out to the pool before the sun really went down and it got too cold. They headed outside with Olga while I went upstairs and put my trunks on to do a few cannonballs with them. As I walked out, I heard Sonny ratting me out to the nanny for not slathering his sunblock on. Of course, word of my crime eventually got to Lynette adding to the constantly growing list of grievances and reasons for her to give me the cold shoulder. And thus I got cock-blocked over sunblock.

Then there was the Sunday, correction, the football Sunday, I had to spend at the park with the kids in Sonny and Natalia’s class, their parents and their teachers for a getting-to-know-you event. When I got there, I walked up behind two dudes of suspect sexuality in yoga pants and shirts with no sleeves and a bunch of five-year-olds in front of them. Yep, yoga in the park for kids. For what? Stress relief? You’re five, what’s causing you stress? Tough session of Fruit Ninja on the iPad? Zipper broke on your Doc McStuffins backpack? You need to get yourself grounded before that make-or-break finger-painting session? This is what people in Arkansas and Nebraska are thinking of when they make fun of California. When Woody Allen did all those gags about Los Angeles in Annie Hall, even he wasn’t clever enough to come up with yoga in the park for five-year-olds.

So on top of the cool zones and yoga, our kids are fed a steady diet of unearned praise and self-esteem.

You just need to look at their T-shirts to see how much our kids love themselves. I saw a kid wearing a Nike shirt the other day that read “My Way, All Day.” I wanted to take him aside, sit him down and say, “Listen, you little shit. It will be your way all day in 2050 if you don’t fuck this part up. Your job right now is to be a kid and listen to adults.” It’s not even so much what ideas like this are doing to our kids, it’s what will happen when these kids become adults. I was driving through Hollywood and saw a guy who looked like a rapper you’d never heard of wearing a hat that read “Fuck Humble.” Well, it was a nice society while it lasted.