Spears Family Values
UPDATED below with Crittenden household parenting tips at reader’s request.
Truly unfathomable news. The publishers of Lynne Spears parenting tome have spiked the project. What kind of sick opportunitists would take on a parenting book by Britney’s mom …
… and quash it just when it’s getting good? Morons! Following on Britney’s pathetic, public head-shaving/parental meltdown, Jamie Lynn’s teen pregnancy could make this a runaway hit in 2008. Boston Herald:
Jamie Lynn Spears’ unplanned pregnancy has derailed more than her own career.
A Christian publisher, which planned to print a parenting book written by the 16-year-old’s mom, Lynne Spears – called off the deal “indefinitely.”
Oh. A Christian publisher, that’s who. Maybe they were planning on a book about how Lynne Spears bears her cross and finally figured out she’s the one who’s been driving the nails in.
Apparently Jamie Lynn’s belly bump trumps her sister Britney’s laundry list of bad behavior in the eyes of the Thomas Nelson publishing company.
“We have postponed the book indefinitely,” Lindsey Nobles, spokeswoman for the Tennessee-based book people, said.
Nobles declined to give an official reason for the decision.
As you know, Nickelodeon’s “Zoey 101” star announced to OK! magazine Tuesday that she is three months pregnant.
Luckily for the kiddie channel, production had already wrapped on the fourth and final season of “Zoey.”
In the OK! interview, the teen said she was “shocked and scared” when she found out she was preggers with her 19-year-old boyfriend, Casey Aldridge’s baby.
Mama Spears told OK! she was particularly surprised by little Jamie’s unexpected news because the teen is “always conscientious” and never even breaks curfew, ya’ll!
Meanwhile it appears the Spears don’t stand to profit from the exclusive story they dished to OK! magazine – notorious for doling out hefty payouts to celebrities who dish – TMZ.com reports.
Apparently, the teen pregnancy story was a tit-for-tat thank you for the way the celebrity rag handled the elder trainwreck meltdown during a photo shoot earlier in the year.
According to a friend of the fam, Lynn put in a call to thank OK! “for handling it so well,” and kept in touch with the editors.
Lynn then called the mag this week when she realized her youngest daughter’s pregnancy news was about to get out. Reportedly her only condition for the story was that they leave her 26-year-old pop singer daughter out of the story.
However, OK! did offer Jamie Lynn $1 million for a photo shoot after the baby is born.
Well, that’s pretty sensitive parenting with no small amount of self-sacrifice, horsetrading to keep the family trainwreck out of her little sister’s joyous news. As is always the case in good parenting, when you make the tough calls, the payoff comes later.
UPDATE: Steve in Ohio, like me, is eager to see what wisdom is in this tome. In comments, Steve tuts:
I think the book would have had great value if it answered questions like:
“What happens when your teenagers have resources that dwarf yours and they become surrounded by people who will feed their teenage self-destructive tendencies?” What would you do, Jules?
Good question. Always hard to say what one would do in some hypthetical situation. I can tell you what I did, though. I didn’t whore my kids out to Hollywood. Crittenden household parenting method, doesn’t require a book:
Read to them. Tell them stories. Play with them and take them places. Expect them to be polite. Make sure they have table manners. Give them responsibilities. Make sure they do their homework. Make them do it again if they need to. Make sure they do their chores. Limit screen time. Encourage sports and skill-building activities, but not to the extent they interfere with primary kid jobs of school and play. Pay attention to who they are hanging out with. Watch them like a hawk. Make it as hard for them to get away with what you got away with as it was for you. Go to work every day and keep the house clean. Also, and this one is important, don’t whore them out to Hollywood. Let them have a childhood.
There’s more, but that’s the gist of it. It isn’t perfect or foolproof, but so far, so good … knock on wood. Payoffs thus far exceed any baubles of fame or cash.
Welcome Pajamas, etal! So good to see you. In the news: unpopular quagmire to drag on, Sadr to stay on the sidelines. Need more news? After Action. And here’s Time maggie’s Mange of the Year: Vlad the Stabilizer.
Topics: motherhood
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 7:18 am Comments (8) on Thursday, December 20, 2007
8 Responses to “Spears Family Values”
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December 20th, 2007 at 8:20 am
[...] Jules Crittenden takes a look at Cajun Family Spears. [...]
December 20th, 2007 at 11:36 am
I (probably vainly) hope that someday the public will give up its addiction to news stories about people that my mother used to call “poor white trash with money”.
December 20th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
I would venture to say that the people who are taking great delight in the “failure” or The Mother Spears do not have kids, or were lucky enough to have note experienced the belly-flops these two siblings have done. I think the book would have had great value if it answered questions like:
“What happens when your teenagers have resources that dwarf yours and they become surrounded by people who will feed their teenage self-destructive tendencies?” What would you do, Jules?
Lynne Spears biggest failure in my mind is that she probably had no idea how much control she would lose once she fed her children to the mega-celebrity machine; she probably thought that if things got too bad, well, she could pack up the kids and head back to Louisiana. Sadly for Brittany and Jamie Lynn she was wrong.
December 20th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Mrs. Spears had to have lived in a cave not to understand the great maul of the celebrity machine. That family has profited by it, and hasn’t shown the character to handle the profits.
Rebecca, my grandmother would have said that they were a “perfect mess” of a white-trash family with money.
December 21st, 2007 at 7:31 am
Free Lynne Spears!
Why is this administration silencing her?
Oh, the chill that has descended on our land!
December 21st, 2007 at 10:00 am
[...] only was it a big shock to Lynn Spears, a book publisher was in shock as well: Lynn Spears has written a book on parenting. A Christian publisher would publish the book, but [...]
December 21st, 2007 at 6:30 pm
You neglected Tank and Aircraft Recognition skills.
Cheers
February 1st, 2008 at 7:35 am
[...] luck with that, Britney. That caring-people train left the station a long time ago. Maybe it’s time to revisit child labor and exploitation laws, seeing as the perverted [...]