Picket Fence Post

This past weekend, my column on the plethora of inappropriately sexy Halloween costumes being marketed to young girls ran on the front page of the MetroWest Daily News’ Sunday Opinion Section.

It must’ve been serendipity because the very next day, I saw this photo of Miley Cyrus’ 9-year-old sister Noah dressed up for a Halloween party looking as though she’d donned one of the costumes I’d railed against as being bad for young girls and sending them the wrong messages.

The blog DListed had more photos of Noah in her costume which were just as stomach-churning as this one.

When I see these Halloween photos, along with teenaged Miley Cyrus’ recent pole dancing act at the Teen Choice Awards in August, I don’t feel confident in the message the Cyrus family is attempting to send to young girls, especially when my 11-year-old daughter’s a Hannah Montana fan.

Image credit: Juan Rico/Fame Pictures via Parent Dish.

Mad Men Returns

Have I mentioned that Mad Men’s third season premieres on Sunday night on AMC? I think I may have, once or twice.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a tad bit obsessed with the award-winning drama set in the 1960s which follows the (mostly) men who work for a Manhattan ad agency and their families. I’ve been counting down the days until new episodes air, so much so that I think The Spouse is jealous of my crush on Don Draper (Jon Hamm). He jokes that Mad Men is all I’ve been talking about lately. Of course he’s wrong. Kind of.

Speaking of Don Draper . . . when we last saw the character at the end of the sophomore season,  his wife/at-home mother of his children, Betty (January Jones) had just allowed him to move back into their suburban home. Betty had made Don spend several weeks in a hotel after he humiliated her by cheating on her AGAIN, this time with an older business associate whose husband was Don’s client. However after learning she was pregnant with her third child, Betty reluctantly decided to proceed with the pregnancy (after flirting with the idea of obtaining an illegal abortion, it was 1962) and let Don back home. The question remains about whether she’s forgiven him or whether he’s going to stop his rampant cheating.

My Pop Culture column this week at Mommy Track’d is all about not just Betty, but all the women of Mad Men.

Oh, Miley

Miley, Miley, Miley. I don’t know what to make of the recent evolution of this 16-year-old Disney star, the face of the Hannah Montana franchise, of which my 10-year-old daughter is so fond.

 What I’ve been seeing as of late has not been promising.

Take, for example, her performance at this week’s Teen Choice Awards – and the ensuing debate over whether she was actually pole dancing while dressed in sexy, butt-revealing attire backed up by dancers in bras and short-shorts – which made me deeply sad. Sure, a tween/teen star needs to evolve into a more mature image, take on older material in order to continue growing as an artist, but this road that Miley appears to be traversing . . . nothing good seems like it’s gonna come from this. Lest we forget, Britney Spears was once a squeaky clean Mouseketeer. And when Spears, I mean Cyrus, invoked Britney during her Choice Awards performance, I shuddered.

John Hughes, Creator of 1980s Teen Flicks

You might’ve heard that the director/writer of some of Generation X’s best loved teen films — Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty in Pink– passed away last week. Since then, there’s been all manner of tribute and appreciations for Hughes, including a great one in the Boston Globe by Wesley Morris.

An excerpt, referencing the world of Hughes’ films:

“There was no war, no sweeping social movement during this period. Just Ronald Reagan and sad old Grenada. No one talked about race or AIDS. The world revolved around detention, crushes and proms. Sometimes it was just ‘Pretty in Pink.’ But what redeemed these movies was their sideways cool. May all so-called misfits be as hot as Eric Stoltz and Mary Stuart Masterson. And on his uneven playing field, Hughes did come up with achingly human characters. They were always on the sidelines or reluctant to get in the game — even their own. [Molly] Ringwald’s Samantha in ‘Sixteen Candles.’ [Jon] Cryer’s Duckie in ‘Pretty in Pink.’ Masterson’s Watts in ‘Some Kind of Wonderful.’ And, best of all, Jeannie Bueller and Cameron Frye in ‘Ferris Bueller.’ Jennifer Grey was the seething Cassandra of that movie, desperately trying to expose the little brother as the brat [Matthew] Broderick so star-makingly was.”

Do you have a favorite 1980s/Hughes flick? Mine’s a tie between Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.

Image credit: Chris Pizzello/AP via Star-Ledger.

Item #1: Kid-Sick Parents

Read any of the slew of news stories recently about “kid-sick” parents who, when sending their children off to sleep-away camp, insist on constant communication with their kids and, in some cases, flouted the camp “no cell phone” rules by smuggling a phone into their offspring’s stuff? Well I have, and so has syndicated columnist Betsy Hart, the host of the “It Takes a Parent” radio show. She had me on as a guest to discuss what she calls the “Over-Tethered Generation.” You can listen to the show and sparkling conversation (at one point I use the pithy phrase “going all 007″) here.

Item #2: Tiger Beat

I had no idea that Tiger Beat magazine was still being published. To me, Tiger Beat means Shawn Cassidy, Rick Springfield and Mark Hamill. It resurrects a variety of memories involving flavored Bonnie Bell lip gloss, rainbow shoelaces for my hard Nike sneakers, a large comb sticking out of the right back pocket of my Jordache jeans and chewing multiple pieces of Bubble Yum.

To my daughter, however, who literally squealed when she spotted a Tiger Beat in the local drugstore this week and begged me to buy it – with all my nostalgia, how could I not? — Tiger Beat means the Jonas Brothers, Demi Lovato & the Camp Rock crew, some teen named Selena, the ubiquitous Miley Cyrus and, of course, the cast of High School Musical I, II and XXIV: The Social Security Years.

At the time of this post, posters of the aforementioned folks have been tacked all over her bedroom walls, alongside an inspirational, framed gymnastics poster I put up and the framed HSM poster I tastefully placed in just the right location in her room. It now looks like a Tiger Beat explosion in there, distinctly un-Pottery Barn Kid. Her ‘tweens have officially arrived.

Item #3: Obama Girls’ Crazy Sked

Any regular reader of the Picket Fence Post is familiar with my vociferous objections to over-stuffed kids’ schedules and the havoc those schedules wreak on family life. (As the beginning of the boys’ first football season creeps nearer — with four practices/week starting in August — I’m already getting the dry heaves about having to get them to everything on time while trucking my daughter to her travel soccer stuff. Oh, and have my own personal and work life.)

So when I read an AP story about the extra-curricular schedule for Michelle and Barack Obama’s girls — ages 10 and 7 — I was astonished. While Michelle Obama does have her mother at home to help her with the girls when Michelle is campaigning for her husband’s presidential bid, and Barack is busy on a global odyssey, imagine trying to keep up this kid schedule with everything else that’s going on with the Obama family: Piano and tennis lessons for both girls; soccer, dance and drama for the 10-year-old and gymnastics and tap for the 7-year-old.

Just reading that list — and knowing that Dad is never home and Mom has massive campaign obligations — I can’t help but wonder how in the world they accomplish all of this with just the help of one grandma.

Item #4: Girls & Math

Forget that stupid talking Barbie doll which years ago uttered, “Math class is tough.” A new study commissioned by the National Science Foundation says that, when it comes to boys and girls there is parity in their achievements. “The researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems,” wrote Tamar Lewin in the New York Times. “They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.”

A study co-author told the Times: “Now that enrollment in advanced math courses is equalized, we don’t see gender differences in test performance . . . But people are surprised by these findings, which suggests to me that the stereotypes are still there.”

So let’s take up the cause and send our girls the message that they’re just as good as boys in the numbers and E=MC squared arena. You go (calculate) girls.

Image credit: Associated Press.