What says âHappy Mothers Dayâ better than telling a mom she sucks as a mother? That’s exactly what happened to Nicole âSnookiâ Polizzi when she proudly posted the above picture to Instagram of getting her two-year old daughter, Giovanna, ready for a dance recital. While many of her fans gave her cyber thumbsâ up, others chose to chastise her for putting makeup on such a young girl. As will surprise no one, Snooki didn’t care for the critique on her parenting and after the recital she posted this in response to her detractors:
Thereâs an argument that can be made for Snooki to let this go. I generally find that most kickass moms donât feel the need to declare it – they know it. Of course, these are not people who receive an onslaught of criticism for their every move by anonymous keyboard warriors. But at some point Snooki needs to accept the fact that she made a career out of being shocking so people are used to looking for ways to attack her.
However, the bulk of my Anderson Cooper-approved eye-rolling is reserved for the dolts who went after poor Giovanna on her big day. Do we really care that much if Snooki puts mascara on her kid? So much so that we need to attack her for what is otherwise a sweet little picture? Granted Iâm overtired but Iâm basically done with people being outraged just for the sake of being outraged. In all of the horrible cases of wretched human beings, I donât think I’ve ever once read it all went wrong the day they applied mascara too young. To truly mount my soapbox here â who draws the line at too much? We celebrate kids running around in costumes â i.e. superheroes, princes/princes, cops and robbers – isnât makeup an extension of that? Why is it worse than a mask? Plus, in addition to being a showcase of the work a child has put into learning a dance routine, recitals are fun. If a little mascara psyches the kid up, I say go for it. So often in these absurd Mommy Wars, I find myself wanting to shout, âCanât we all just get along?â Then again, I have never once proclaimed, âI am a kick ass mom!â so what do I know?
Ultimately, it looks like Sookie was allowed to enjoy her Mothers Day in the embrace of her kids. I hope that she took more value in that than whatever the idiots had to say that day.
Photo credit: Instagram and WENN Photos
Plus I think it has been established that applying eyeliner and a lot of it too young can lead to a child becoming the wife of a prince and future queen of a realm or wife of a moderately rich man, right?
So, there’s that in Snooki’s favor, too.
Moderately terribly rich!
I think we should make it a Spartacus thing, I’ll start it off… No, I’M a kick ass mum. (if the practice of benign neglect counts.)
Yo, Spartacus!
Right on.
But she didn’t call herself kick ass. I wouldn’t see a thing wrong with it if she did though. Nothing wrong with reminding oneself that one is awesome from time to time.
I follow her on snapchat and I have to say, she is an amazing mother. You can tell her life revolves around her children and she is completely genuine in her devotion to them. I don’t care how confident you are in your parenting, having that many people tell you how awful you are will affect you. Parenting is a very sensitive subject and she didn’t deserve that harsh treatment. Especially from strangers.
The problem is no one really knows who is a good mother or not just be pics or social media. I mean Joan Crawford and Bing Cosby had GREAT pics of them being great parents.
We just don’t know.
As for the makeup — it CAN lead to dangerous things I think while seemingly innocent at first.. dressing a baby like an adult or “sexy” because its “fun”. Then they never really seem to have a childhood they are kids acting like adults.
I think this one instance is she was just wearing makeup for an event for fun and doesn’t seem to do it all the time but I think some parents do treat their kids like they are mini adults and not kids too soon. Let them be kids! They can wear makeup, have a job, later.
You are the problem. You’re ridiculous.
Yeah well I danced as a kid. During performances our lil’ faces were caked with make-up. Why? So our faces, our expressions would not get lost in stage light. A dancer’s face, their expressions are a part of the story a dance tells. Even if the story’s danced by a small kid.
The victim-blaming starts at such an early age and is so insidious, isn’t it?
I came down here to say, I bet she is a great mom. She just gives off that vibe – like sure she lived it up when she was young and single, but you know she’s very passionate and caring. I have an old friend who’s a single mom/kind of a party girl but a total badass and clearly a great parent, her kid LOVES her. Reminds me of Snookie a little bit.
My parents were pretty strict, but I remember having makeup applied for dance recitals and competitions when I was little. All of the kids did. I just don’t see it as a big deal, even though I HATED the eyelash curler.
Yup. Makeup is *required* for recitals by my kid’s dance school, because the lights wash out faces if they’re not exaggerated. Stage makeup is a whole different animal than streetwear, applied differently, for different reasons.
And for the latter, I’d say the appropriate time for a kid to start playing with makeup… is when they get interested in playing with makeup. Putting colour on lips and eyelids is hardly the first step towards moral degeneracy, and we only assume it is because we’ve associated cosmetics with dangerous female sexuality for way too long. (Anyone else remember ‘only fast girls wear red lipstick’?)
Wiley,
EXACTLY. We associate makeup with loose morals because that’s what a patriarchal, evangelical system of beliefs has told us to do for… like… ever.
Shambles, we actually know when that happened! The French Revolution and the movement from the Georgian era in England into the Regency. On both sides of the Channel, cosmetics became associated with the degeneracy of the nobility vs. the ‘good plain living’ of the lower classes.
This is also when men tended to stop wearing knee breeches, because the short pants were also associated with the people on the wrong end of the guillotine. (French revolutionaries were actually called ‘sans-culottes,’ or ‘without-breeches’ because they wore longer pants as a sign of working-class solidarity.)
So from the early 1800s on, basically, cosmetics were associated with loose morals, degenerate sensuality, frivolous spending, everything that was considered ‘bad’ about the ruling classes who had just gotten their butts soundly kicked. It’s class war that subsumed into gender war.
/history of fashion nerd
Ahhh this is awesome! Thank you for sharing your fashion nerd wisdom.
Hope at least it wasn’t waterproof so that if it got into her eye at some point it would dissolve and not be as irritating to the eye.
i loved playing with makeup when i was little and all i wanted was to look like my aunt so she and my mom indulged me every sunday at my grandma’s house! rollers, 7 layer bang, blue eyeliner. it was totally harmless. also was in dance are we were shellacked with hairspray and makeup for recitals and it was so fun! what’s the big deal?!
Trolls trolling again
Is that the ‘after’ pic in the gym? Can’t even tell it’s on there. My two year old puts on more makeup than that when I’m desperately trying to clean something for four seconds before she finds something else :p
Snooki does seem like a truly wonderful mom. I really enjoy following her on insta, as I’m a toddler mom myself.
Is it really required to put makeup on a little child for recitals? I have NO judgement for those who do. But for me, I wouldn’t like to put makeup on my two year old girl. I just wouldn’t like it. Babies and children are so beautiful just as they are. Something about it makes me uncomfortable, personally, for my own child.
Yup – it’s absolutely required. Stage lights wash out facial features, so you need to use cosmetics to emphasize them, or you get a performance with a bunch of faceless Slendermen on stage. Everyone wears makeup on stage, even male actors. Think of it as costume face paint, part of dressing for the show, not street makeup.
Which is also why, when you see performers in interviews and pictures not on stage, their makeup looks so dark and overdone — dark lips, heavy eyeliner, really red blush — because that’s the kind of emphasis needed to make a face look plain or barely made-up under the lights.
I understand that heavy makeup is required for adult performers, but for a bunch of toddlers bobbing on stage it seems overdone. They aren’t going to be nominated for Tony’s.
I guess you can just get photoshop for the retouching you’re going to have to do just to see their eyes…
Yes-my daughter danced back in the day. She never wore makeup otherwise but it is required at recitals.
American parents need to stop with the sexualisation of young girls.
Ironically, the people in every culture who are preoccupied with chastising people about how letting little girls wear mascara, (here) wear shorts in the presence of male relatives (the Duggars) or not wear a hijab (something problematic I learned about from a feminist Muslim) are contributing to the sexualization of little girls AND the ‘boys will be boys’ culture at the same time.
Give me a break. It’s makeup for a dance recital. She isn’t dancing on a pole.
OMG…. it is mostly required at most dance studios that the dancers (no matter the age) wear makeup for recitals. It doesn’t make anyone a bad mom.
Jesus – thank you! My niece was 6 years old at a dance recital and she wore makeup. And she survived unscathed. So were the other dozens of tiny girls wearing pink and blue dance dresses. And they survived unscathed.
Can we stop judging people and how they parent their children. She is putting on mascara for a dance recital which is pretty much alway required. She seems like a very involved and caring mother which is what is important, not the precived wrongs or mistakes others see.
Makeup at dance recitals is pretty typical. I have to put it on my 4 year old for her recital in a month. It’s not really to “prettify” them as much as it is to make it so they don’t look like death on stage. Seriously, those lights really wash you out and you can tell who is wearing a little makeup and who isn’t very easily. The child with makeup will look healthy and the one without will look like they have the flu.
Being a mom is friggin hard. The hardest thing because it’s constant. Once you start it’s for the rest of your life. Far too many people out there are hating. We just need to accept each other for our differences. We should just agree to disagree!
Sorry if I’m rambling. I haven’t slept in 4 years….
Amen! I struggled with Mom Shamingâ quite a bit when my son was younger. I was active duty USAF, as was my hubby and people judged my parenting skills as inadequate for it. I was told military Moms were no batter than crack whores. I was judged because we were always honest with our son about deployments and world events. We were/are extremely honest about my health issues mainly because I don’t want him to think I don’t want to do things, I just can’t sometimes.
Kids don’t come with owners manuals but as a parent if your kids are healthy and happy…you are doing something right.
Makeup, glitter & fun costumes in dance recitals &/or competitions go hand in hand….it’s not like she had done this to go to the supermarket. And in the after pic the little girl still just looks like a happy little girl. Geezus, some people just need to chill
Mascara on a toddler’s eyelashes – or young girl under 15-16 is not necessary IMO. Too much of a hassle getting it off, it happens to many women as well (yes, I am there). For my dance recital – only one, when I was 5, they applied a really ugly green cream eye shadow, cream blush and lipstick. I felt and looked like a clown but I enjoyed wearing make-up because it was a grown-up thing to do. And I got to wear it until I got home.
I’m team Snooki on this one. Most of the outrage over this was probably from the types of people who hypersexualize every single thing girls do in the name of ‘protecting them from perverts.’ I know there’s another concern to about the risk of little girls growing up to base all their worth on beauty or sexiness, but mascara alone won’t do that . This little girl I babysat as a preteen was allowed by her good, somewhat strict, but very loving parents to occasionally wear sparkly lip gloss along with her sister to give into their little fairy princess fantasies, but those girls turned out fine.