How to Avoid Your Kids Embarrassing You on Jimmy Kimmel

Michelle Dawson
5 min readApr 24, 2017

There are three easy tips you can teach your child to avoid having them embarrass you on Jimmy Kimmel’s Lie Witness News, Watters’ World or any other forum for public humiliation. And they don’t need to know all three — knowing only one is insurance enough. Let’s just hit them up-front, shall we:

· Don’t speak on what you don’t know

· Get informed

· Be humble and/or truthful

That’s it! Goodnight, folks!

Oh, you want a little “how exactly do I make that happen?” Just the thought of having my “friends” share on Facebook, “Hey, Marie was on Jimmy Kimmel last night,” makes me cringe. You know, the interviews on the street where they ask if they prefer the Affordable Care Act to Obamacare, or how they feel about North Korea getting the sequester (I don’t want to know it if you don’t know what’s wrong with these questions), and then not only play the tape on television but give it a life of its own on social media?

The sympathy I feel for the subjects’ parents is akin to when a child is abducted. It’s the same “How could this happen?! In our day and age?! With our lovely, safe schools?”

So like stranger-danger, I’ve been taking steps to avoid such a nightmare and want to share them with you just in case you’re related to me or your child attends my child’s school and could possibly embarrass me.

Don’t speak on what you don’t know. The first and most effective tip. If you are not absolutely positive of what the sequester is, or if a certain person (like Martin Luther King, Jr.) actually endorsed Trump for president, or if there is even a difference in Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act, or…oh, I can’t go on….if you don’t know what the heck they are talking about completely, don’t speak.

Or if the polite habit of response is so deeply ingrained, pull out an obscure foreign language, Pig-Latin or just fake being deaf. But above all else, don’t speak in an understandable language on the topic. And most certainly do not offer your opinion.

This has worked for me. In fifth grade, Eric Wellington would shout out in class, “Vagina!” Why Mrs. Libretta did not hear that is beyond me! (This is a true story — names have not been changed to protect anyone. And I’m not implying that Eric was a bad kid — he wasn’t. But he was …. a boy.) Then he would go up to girls individually and ask them, “Do you know what a vagina is?” To which many would say, “No, what?” and laughter from Eric and his friends would ensue. So I determined that this was the wrong answer. When he bestowed his graces on me, I gave him the old clucking of the tongue in disgust and turned away. You see — I did not speak!! I was not implicated! My parents were not implicated! And I promptly went home and called my mom at work and asked, “What’s a virginia?” (Not a typo — this is what I asked.)

I had to wait until she got home for my answer…which really lowered my opinion of Eric, by the way. What if I had started shouting, “Penis?” I didn’t, because even back then, I didn’t speak on what I didn’t know.

But our children don’t have to wait until they get home for the answers. They can go a few steps past the interviewer, stop, and search their phone to realize that no endorsements are given from the grave.

Get informed. This is the hardest of all the tips. It actually involves reading real articles on-line from several points of view when you’d rather be looking at cats. Or engaging in class discussions and adult conversations. I know, no good solutions here.

The incentive to do this is them being good civic citizens and being knowledgeable in the voters’ booth. But for many, that’s not incentive enough.

Unless they’ve auditioned for American Idol without merit, embarrassment could be enough — show them clips of these people being interviewed and tell them that the Affordable Care Act and Obama Care are the SAME THING! Go on and on about their foolishness. Be merciless! Remember Scared Straight? (These days Beyond Scared Straight.) Give them incentive to be good/to know something.

Be humble and/or truthful. Okay, in this day and age, this one is hard, too. It might need to be practiced at home. It requires making oneself vulnerable. But if they can do this, life is a walk in the park.

There are several versions of this. And again, if they can master one of the other tips, they don’t need this, although it’s always a nice tool to have.

If they don’t know anything about the topic but simply must speak in English, try, “Gosh, I’m familiar with the terms but probably not as informed as you are.” The “Gosh,” is a nice touch. Or, “I’m not as current on who is endorsing whom so I really should pass on commenting.” Have them practice this one in order to get the grammar correct, even if it’s just by memorizing…

Practicing being humble and/or truthful at home might look something like this:

Prompt: Here, have a puff…

Your Child: Oh, I could never be as cool as you so I ought to not deplete the supply and just save my money.

Prompt: That kid is such a dork! (Okay, substitute “dork” with whatever…)

Your Child: I’m not prepared to speak on dorkiness so will refrain from concurring until I’m able to do further research.

So you see, we can be saved from embarrassment by using just one of the above three tips. I hope you’ll sleep better tonight. I know I will since we’re currently reinforcing tip #1 with duct tape.

When she’s not waking up to visions of her children on Jimmy Kimmel, Michelle Dawson is committed to helping parents like her actively and subtly INFORM their children on a daily basis in order to increase family sharing-laughing-earning-bonding-talking time. She can be found at Family Bedtime Online.

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Michelle Dawson

New Blogger — Writing to inspire herself during CQ2020, and to encourage kids of all ages — 73 on down — to think, learn and teach what’s important to them.