Taking a child to a concert can be a bonding moment for a parent and their kid. When the child is young, having the parent chaperon can be the only way that the kid is able to attend the show. This was called into question last year when a mother took her daughter to her first rock show -- a Pink concert at Newark's Prudential Center in New Jersey. The father of the child and the woman's ex-husband accused the mother of "bad parenting" and used the concert as a centerpiece in an ongoing custody battle over the 11-year-old girl. New Jersey Superior Court Judge Lawrence R. Jones ruled in an expansive 37-page decision, writing that the mother "in no way, shape or form exceeded the boundaries of reasonable parental judgment" by bringing her daughter to the concert according to NJ.com.
In his decision, Jones gave a long history of rock-n-roll, probably from his own catalog of knowledge and records, and its largely positive impact on American culture during the 1960s and 1970s. He refuted the notion that attending a rock concert could be somehow misconstrued as wholly inappropriate for a child. As for Pink, he cited her as positive role model with tracks like "The Great Escape" and "Perfect."
"[The mother's] decision did not subject the child to any unreasonable risk of harm, or compromise [her] health, safety or welfare," Jones wrote. "To the contrary, when all the smoke from the custody litigation clears, it will be self-evident that all which happened here is that a young girl went to her first rock concert with her mother and had a really great time."
He put the concert in context of modern society, where sheltering your child from profanity and unsavory content is a near impossibility and fool hearted at best.
"The reality is that minors in the United States are potentially exposed to profanities all the time through movies, television, and the internet. Further, the fact that a minor hears a profanity in the context of an artistic performance, with parental consent, does not automatically render a parent's decision wrongful or age-inappropriate," Jones argued. "To the contrary, in the context of story-telling as creative art, profanities are frequently implemented as part of socially acceptable artistic dialogue."
The decision was rendered in Jan. 2014, but according to NJ.com, it was not released to the public until this weekend.
