One morning a couple of weeks ago, we were all going through our regular morning routine and getting ready for the day – which includes tuning to abc13 for Good Morning America (the best morning show around these parts!) and a teaser came up about a mom who was giving her daughter Botox.

It turns out a woman in the San Francisco area was giving her 8-year old daughter Botox injections on a regular basis. She didn’t take the girl to a medical professional – which would have been crazy enough, but she was doing them herself, at home! The little girl is a regular participant in child beauty pageants, and according to the mother, the little girl did not like wrinkles and requested the Botox injections herself! Amazingly, the girl backed up her mother’s story and said she preferred her much Botox-ed face to her regular 8-year old face. What would an 8-year old face know about wrinkles, I ask myself?

It just seemed so weird and strange to see her sitting down quietly for the injections, more stoic than many adults facing a needle (myself included) and then skipping around gaily shortly afterwards.

There’s been a lot in the press about how our children are growing up so quickly, effectively missing out on the kind of childhood that many of us had…we regularly see and hear about teen moms - and even some pre-teen ones (thanks, MTV and Maury show), under-age sex, sexting and all sorts of things, but somehow the thought of an 8-year old getting Botox squicked me out just a little bit more. If she’s getting Botox at 8, what will she do at 10, 11, 15? She’s already said she intends to get a nose/boob job when she turns 16 so she can become a star….that figures.

Many children these days are pretty conversant with adult issues, and with the continued moral decay of society, it only promises to get worse. I look at my daughter in all her childish innocence and I’m scared about the kind of world she’s growing up in. I wonder if I have what it takes to teach and nurture her so that she can make right and godly decisions. I try to imagine what she’ll be like in 10, 20 years…I can only pray that with God’s help, her father and I will do our best to raise her right…sans Botox, of course.

Onyih Odunze