Parents want a Disney princess nanny. But kids can't live (and grow) in a cartoon

Suzanne Lambert
Updated
"All parents want to raise our kids in pillow forts of happiness where everything is safe and wholesome. But we have to fight that impulse."

Perhaps you’ve heard of the English couple offering $53,000 a year for a nanny.

Wait! Before you start polishing up your resume, there’s one catch: The successful applicant will have to dress — and act — like Disney princesses to care for the couple’s 5-year-old twins.

"We know this isn’t a normal request for nannies,” the mom says with what sounds astonishingly like self-awareness in a post on Childcare.co.uk before she continues, “however, we think it would be a great way to teach our girls about things like determination, compassion, fearlessness and ambition from strong yet relatable female role models like Princess Tiana, Princess Anna, Belle and Cinderella."

Don't 'real' people have anything to teach?

It's all about character, you see.

Except the part where these parents are setting up their children to see their nannies – and likely by extension, everyone else – as interchangeable props in their own personal dramas.

Apparently actual normal, human, real-personality-having nannies named, say, Jessica, Keisha, Amanda or Sarah, would have nothing to share with the twins about determination, compassion, fearlessness or ambition. But if they pretend to be fictional characters Tiana, Anna, Belle or Cinderella, well, now we’re talking strong and relatable role models!

I understand the impulse. I really do. All parents want to raise our kids in pillow forts of happiness where everything is safe and wholesome and a storybook all the time. That’s true no matter your income bracket, whether you’re tempted to save your kids heartache by finishing their science-fair projects, or, oh, I dunno, bribing their way into Stanford.

But we have to fight that impulse. Fight it like a pair of Spanx on wet skin.

Because when we give in to it, we rob our kids of the very important, very real character-building bumps and imperfections in life that teach them how to become resilient, solve problems and develop into functional adults. And in the curious case of the princess nanny, how to deal with people in their lives being, well, people and not walking Disney cosplay.

Buying a fantasy childhood sounds wonderful, but without struggle and a chance to build honest relationships, Tiana, Anna, Belle and Cinderella would never be heroes. They’d forever be stuck on the first pages of their books.

We owe our kids the same chance.

I’m still going to apply, though; $53K is a lot of money.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Parents want a Disney princess nanny. But kids can't live (and grow) in a cartoon