On why Bindi Irwin creeps me out, why she makes me cringe and why she should get a real life.

Look at any youtube clip of her. No kid talks like that naturally. Sure, she has had a really weird father (let’s call a spade a spade here – he was incredibly weird) but come on. Look at how she was at his funeral. Did she cry? What is going on? Is she a robot? Most of the people that didn’t even know her father outside of tv were crying yet she doesn’t even blink. Her euology reading was more akin to someone reading something out of a kid’s picture book. So either she is devoid of any real emotion, has been so heavily coached that it just isn’t funny or she doesn’t actually really understand the events of the past few months.

This isn’t her fault, of course – she’s only eight, for heavens sake. However, I really do get a sense that she’s a ticking timebomb. The thing about child ‘stars’ is that often they don’t know that they can choose just to be normal. When you’re so young you can’t really comprehend your future life direction, so therefore it’s the job of the parents to make that judgement for them. Is it really going to matter if she tried to be normal for the next 10 years? Is the world going to fall apart – are all the crocs going to roll over and die? I thought not. How about seeing her with kids her own age instead of those incredibly lame Crocmen? And go to a real school – homeschooling just doesn’t cut it when you spend the rest of your time around adults. If your social skills don’t develop now it’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever be able to relate to people your own age. It’s not hard to think of precedents for this – pretty much every generation has had at least one child star go off the rails (or in some cases a smattering of them) in one way or another (Britney was a Mouseketeer if you didn’t know).

And finally, if she ‘went normal’ for 10 years at least I wouldn’t have to cringe everytime I saw her on tv – there’s enough misconceptions about Aussies without her adding fuel to the fire, too.