Tags: fight fun with fun, fighting back
Posted May 11th, 2012, in Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 1 Comment
I wrote earlier this week about the must-read YA novel, Kepler’s Dream, which was officially published yesterday. I’m thrilled to report that the book is already racking up stellar reviews. In this coming Sunday’s New York Times “Book Review” the discerning Dani Shapiro–herself a wonderful writer–calls the book “delightful” and “marvelous” and ”full of smart, subversive commentary on the numbing effects of contemporary youth culture.” She adds: But in the end it is Ella’s voice–utterly captivating, idiosyncratic, rich and memorable–that ties all the pieces together in, yes, a kind of dream logic, making this not only an entertaining book but an absorbing and artful one. From Library Journal: Ella’s divorced mother has leukemia and her father is busy guiding trips for his fly-fishing-trip business so the 11-year-old is sent to stay with her grandmother. Neither of her parents gets along well with her father’s mother, and Ella hasn’t ever met her. She joins [...]
Tags: fight fun with fun, fighting back, Let kids be kids
Posted May 9th, 2012, in Princesses, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 3 Comments
Looking for a new “fight fun with fun” book for your middle grade daughter (or son….)? Honey, have I got two for you. Kepler’s Dream, the debut YA novel by Juliet Bell, is about 11-year-old Ella, a clever, compassionate girl whose mother’s cancer treatment and father’s disengagement exile her to “Broken Family Camp” for the summer: staying with her severe-natured grandmother in her peacock-ridden hacienda in Albuquerque. Neither of them is happy about the arrangement. Ella is afraid her mother may die, but all her grandmother seems to care about is her crazy library full of books When a rare and much-loved volume, Kepler’s Dream of the Moon, is stolen, however, Ella decides it’s up to her to find it. The result could be the key to healing her broken family. This is the kind of book I used to love as a girl, back in the days before the [...]
Tags: age compression, fighting back, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, premature sexualization
Posted May 3rd, 2012, in Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups, Why I Wrote CAMD | 4 Comments
When we called people “plastic” back when I was a teenager, it was an insult. These days, apparently, not so much. Joe Kelly, over at The Dadman (an expert on how to father girls, as well as husband to Nancy Gruver, founder of New Moon Girls online community/magazine) sent me a press release discussing the 71% rise in chin implants in 2011, in large part driven by teen girls asking to have the procedure done…for prom. That’s right, 20, 680 surgical procedures at $3,500-$7,000 a pop were performed last year. There has also been a spike in “ear-pinning,” (for those up-dos) which Darrick Antell, a spokesman for the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, informally called “Clark Gable Wings.” Antell told the Sunday Times: At proms in the past, teens would line up for photographs and face the camera. But the rise of more informal images, captured during video chats or by smartphones when they are [...]
Tags: fighting back, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, princess culture
Posted April 24th, 2012, in Creepy Marketing, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 1 Comment
I’ve been off-line for two weeks which is like two centuries in social media time. Here are some of the things I’ve apparently missed. A reader sent me a photo of Kraft’s Girlz cheese. Beyond the gratuitous sexualization of dairy products…um, cheese pods???? This one is from the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum: So, blue or gray for historical accuracy and pink….for girls? I would hate to have been wearing pink in a field of gray. Seriously, pink Confederate soldier caps? As a 7-year-old, my parents took me to Gettysburg. I happily popped my traditional Union blue soldier hat atop my favorite outfit: a red-and-white striped t-shirt (decorated with a jaunty, patriotic blue anchor), cut-off jean shorts and navy blue sneakers. If my scanner weren’t broken, I’d post a Kodak moment of my brothers and me decked out in our caps, dangling our legs over a cannon, waving Old Glory. [...]
Tags: fighting back, girlie girl culture
Posted March 21st, 2012, in Creepy Marketing, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups, Why I Wrote CAMD | 4 Comments
Ah, the ironies of our media culture. First the film version of “The Lorax” commercialized anti-consumerism by pimping out its namesake to seventy corporate sponsors (including IHOP pancakes and Mazda cars). Now comes the deluge of “Hunger Games”-inspired products that are so contrary to the books’ message that they seem like a parody. Take the press release I received today: SAVING FACE in The Hunger Games – Best Beauty Solutions to Shed the ‘Tribute Tomboy’ Hi Peggy, Hope you’re doing well! In just two days the world will be watching as Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson and the rest of their star-studded cast take center stage in The Hunger Games… so with all the hype surrounding the premiere, I figured you might enjoy this fun story idea! Fighting to the death doesn’t always end pretty (case in point, Glimmer’s notorious tracker jacker scene), but Katniss Everdeen made it look so easy, [...]
Posted March 9th, 2012, in Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups, Stuff I've Written | 3 Comments
Ben Freedman, my friend, inspiration and the co-author (with his wife Nancy) of my favorite book as a girl—Mrs. Mike-died on February 24 at the age of 92. I found out earlier this week when the New York Times obituary page called me for a quote. Here is a picture of my original copy of Mrs. Mike, which I still have, held together by scotch tape and rubber bands. Ben and Nancy (who died in 2010) led rich, full lives—I loved going to their apartment to listen to stories of their adventures, schemes and foibles. Even in failing healthy, they were exuberant and intellectually engaged, full of plans for the future, still writing every single day. In honor of their lives, and to mark their loss, here is a link to Ben’s obituary. And here is a link to a piece I wrote for Oprah Magazine about what they meant to me [...]
Tags: Disney, fight fun with fun, fighting back, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, princess culture
Posted February 29th, 2012, in Boys and Girls, Equal Parenting, Princesses, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 21 Comments
In today’s Motherlode Emily Rosenbaum struggles with what seems to her to be a contradiction in the how she parents her daughter vs. her sons. The revelation was triggered when her 3-year-old girl returned from the Home Depot (with Emily’s husband) brandishing a Disney Princess light switch plate (in case you’re keeping track: that would be DP item #25,978 of the 26,000+ I mention in CAMD). It probably looked something like this: Emily was furious, but her husband said: You know, you’re reacting just the way I react when Zach wants to buy pink clothes. You should allow her to express herself as much as you let the boys do it. That pulled Emily up short. Turns out their son, Zach, “is the only boy in his second-grade class to regularly rock a pink hoodie and pink socks. Benjamin spent his toddler years dressed as Tinkerbell, and we potty trained him [...]
Tags: Disney, fight fun with fun, fighting back, girlie girl culture, pink princess culture camd, princess culture
Posted February 29th, 2012, in Boys and Girls, Equal Parenting, Princesses, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 6 Comments
Yikes! I just realized I accidentally posted this twice. For the real version please see above. I will also copy the comments from this post into that one. Sorry!
Tags: fighting back, girlie girl culture, Let kids be kids
Posted February 23rd, 2012, in Equal Parenting, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups, Why I Wrote CAMD | 1 Comment
A reader named Leslie, whose daughter, Callie’s eloquent letter about Lego’s new “Friends” line was summarily dismissed by that company, just sent me this photo: Callie and her cousins made this Lego “birthday cake” for their grandmother, who is unable to eat the real deal. Here’s the family of girls and women preparing to blow out the candles. I bet they wished for creative, open-ended toys that didn’t stereotype and hyper-segment children. And guess what, Lego? THIS IS WHAT BEAUTIFUL LOOKS LIKE!!!!!!
Tags: fighting back
Posted February 5th, 2012, in Fairy Tales, Recommendations, Recommendations Girls, Recommendations Grown-ups | 10 Comments
Before being co-opted by Uncle Walt (and, for that matter, the Brothers Grimm), the medieval, European fairy tales were a women’s medium, an oral tradition shared over long hours of repetitive work, such as spinning (that’s where “spinsters” comes from…). The tales were the entertainment of their day: the movies, the TV, even the porn (did you really think that Rapunzel and the Prince just talked in that tower?). The Grimms recorded the tales of their time and place, but as their compendium went through a variety of reprints–and as the stories became aimed at children–the brothers took out the sex (especially the pervasiveness of incest as the motivation for a heroine’s flight) and amped up the violence. They figured, like many of the day, that scaring the beejezus out of kids would get them to behave. Personally, I love fairy tales and there are those (such as Bruno Bettelheim) [...]
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