In what is perhaps the most unnecessary revelation of the decade, Lynne Spears revealed on Wednesday's Today show that she and Jamie Spears didn't really know what they were doing when they were raising their pop star daughter.
"It's kind of like Britney was sent out into the world a little bit prematurely," said Spears, who was on the show to promote her memoir, Through the Storm.
Wait, you mean to say that the Spears parents – who let their 17-year-old daughter dance around in a bra and pose for magazines in her underwear – didn't have a firm grasp on proper child-rearing techniques? Whoa. It's as though the world has turned upside down.
Spears admitted that the family was initially swept away with all the excitement of Britney's superstardom and didn't know how to turn down things they didn't want to do – such as the infamous underwear photo shoot for Rolling Stone.
"We were so in awe. I never even bought [Rolling Stone], but I just heard this is a really big deal," Spears said. "We were kind of in shock at what was going on. It was a two-day shoot. Thank god [manager] Larry Rudolph came in and said, 'Stop, that's enough.' We didn't have any choice over pictures ... We had no one who could tell us what we were supposed to be doing."
She also told of how she found out about other daughter Jamie Lynn's pregnancy. She received a phone call from her daughter, asking her to come home. When Spears arrived, Jamie Lynn and boyfriend Casey Aldridge were waiting; Jamie Lynn handed her mother a note and asked her to go read it in another room.
"It said she was pregnant and everything was going to be OK. She was going to raise it," Spears remembered.
Although Spears is clearly trying to present an image of flawed-but-well-meaning parent, some of her later comments during the interview indicate that she doesn't fully understand the role she played in her daughters' missteps.
"As a mother, don't we always blame ourselves?" she said. "I took a lot of the blame. I took all the blame. The personality I have, it's always my fault."
Lynne, honey, it's not your personality that makes you feel like it's your fault. Perhaps the reason you took all the blame is because you should.
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