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"Angelina and Brad's wedding is an example of parenting run amok."

 

 

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you should know that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt announced they were married last week.

And, unless you’ve been living under a (slightly smaller but still moderately isolating) rock, you should also know that Angelina’s wedding dress looked like this:

Jolie’s veil was covered in designs created by her six children, embroidered by the fancy folk at Versace.

And that, according to one US writer, was an example of “parenting run amok”.

Jane Ridley writes for the New York Post:

Jolie’s dress is Exhibit A in the case of overindulgent parents gone mad.

What started as a well-meaning trend — rewarding children for every single achievement, telling them they can do no wrong — has spiralled out of control, at least in celebrity circles.

It’s one thing to assign your munchkins the customary roles of page boy or flower girl, but trust uber-couple Brangelina to take it to the next level. The kids wrote the vows (we can only hope they were less cringe-worthy than Brad and Jen’s in 2000, in which he promised to let her control the thermostat and Jennifer Aniston pledged to “always” fix him a banana milkshake). Ten-year-old Pax was even tasked with baking the cake, Jolie tells People, which bought exclusive US rights, alongside international partner Hello! magazine, to the “intimate” Aug. 23 nuptials in Correns, France. The ceremony was “an unusual situation” with “all eight of us getting married,” adds Jolie.

Them’s fighting words – but is there some truth to them?

Is Jolie’s new ‘eight-in-the-marital-bed’ mantra just an extension of this lack of parental control? A lack of a distinction between the parents in charge and their, well, charges?

After all, it was Brangelina’s kids who wanted their parents to get married in the first place.

(Their mum and dad weren’t fussed about the whole thing, saying that they would want to wait until gay marriage was legalised.)

Or, is the reality that this was Brad and Angelina’s wedding, not Jane Ridley’s, so frankly, her opinion is of little consequence or importance?

Did you get married after having kids? How much of a role do you think kids should play in a wedding ceremony?