parenting

Miley Cyrus? From Autobiography to Slutty Photos


Miley Cyrus is a 15 year old singer and actress who is making Uncle Walt and Mickey some of the easiest money since they began pimping the Disney Princesses for all they are worth. She is the star of a hit tweeny-bopper show on the Disney Channel, that coincidentally co-stars her Achy Breaky Dad, Billy Ray, as – surprise – her dad. Her fans cover the gamut of girls from preschool to high school and her recent tour sold out in something like a nano-second, I’ve read. Last week I was not surprised to hear that the reigning nice girl pop princess was offered a seven figure advance to write (herself probably – the kid is just that talented) an autobiography of her life. At fifteen. Sounds plausible to me. You? Okay, I think it might read something like this:

I was born to a one-ish hit wonder country star known for his mullet and tight jeans. By the time he’d played that song for all the money he could wring from it and his acting career on the WB panned out, I was finally old enough and miraculously blessed with a bit of talent myself (and most importantly wasn’t fat or facially challenged) to be pimped groomed for a career in the business.

or something like that.

Today my husband tells me that the acrid taste of presidential politics, with all it’s racial and gender slurring fun, has been displaced by a scandal involving the next Britney Spears tweener cross over to female singer/actor/writing star – our own sweet, innocent Miley. It happens. Annie Leibowitz is a camera toting siren that has led many a celebrity into the twisted world of art cleverly disguised as slutty photos to help prevent the middle class from infiltrating the the ranks of the nouveau hipsters. She’s just a kid despite her talent and fame and money and stage parents and predictable future as a deeply troubled and in need of many, many years of therapy. It happens to a lot of very young celebrities only a generation or two out of the trailer park.

And the pictures? Run of the mill pseudo-suggestive. The kind any parent could order up at the JCPenney Photo Studio. I have seen the ad:

Bring the kid and too old for them attire and we point, click and photoshop. Pictures with inappropriately dressed father (or mom/son) are entirely optional. REALLY. No pressure from us at all.

Miley Cyrus is probably a nice kid. Her folks are probably good parents. The photos are, inappropriate, but not much more so than the senior photos I saw during my last two years as a high school teacher. The big question is why? When so many teen stars implode at ever younger ages, why would you take the chance with your daughter? She’s fifteen. There is time for the adult career when she is an adult and if she is truly talented, she will make it. Why push? Why risk her reputation and yours as a good parent?

Cartoons, Commercials and Fat, Hairy Bastards


While I realize that advertisers aren’t specifically targeting my child above all other children, I wonder if somewhere in the ad world someone isn’t cackling like the Joker at parents who think they can shield their little ones from commercial TV. Unless you are rearing your offspring in RLDS compound in B.C. (because apparently U.S. officials have grown some cohones of late and are enforcing law down that way), odds are good that at some point your child will watch television the way God intended for it to be watched – and that is chuck full of enticing advertisements.

Over our last holiday in the States, my husband and I took advantage of the fact that our little girl prefers to stay with her grandparents over us and we snuck off for a few days to honeymoon our brains out. She meanwhile played and ate and watched uber-amounts of TV with abandon at my folks’. Like the last time she slipped her leash (or we dropped it – semantics here), she indulged in all the cartoons she is not allowed to watch at home. Most of them are on the Cartoon Network and they are not inherently evil. They remind me quite a bit of the old Bugs Bunny stuff I watched at her age which was back in the day before they’d been sanitized and made over to the uptight standards of the PC. So much of it was over my head that I am fairly certain I suffered no lasting damage, and I can see that same type of adult humor in some of the shows Katy likes to watch with her cousins when we are not around. Some of the stuff is even kind of clever and watchable like Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. It even has old stuff I haven’t seen since I was wee like The Perils of Penelope Pitstop and Magilla Gorilla. And of course it has the classics including the original Justice League and Scooby Doo. Does it seem as though I might have watched too much TV as a child? I did. But I think if fueled my imagination more than it damaged it and I can see in Katy’s imaginary play that she is right as rain herself.

So why do Rob and I object to commercial television? It’s the commercial part, of course. Whenever we have visited my folks, Katy comes home with a list of things that we need though we don’t seem to have suffered much without prior to her discovery of our new needs. Last fall it was cereal.

“Some people buy those kinds of cereals, Mama,” she said as we walked through the breakfast aisle at Safeway.

“Which cereals?”

With a sweeping gesture “All the sugar ones that are bad for you.”

“I see and how do you know this?”

“I saw it at Grandma’s house.”

“Well, some people do but we don’t buy food just because we saw it on TV.”

This elicited quite the chuckle from an older woman who was pushing her cart by us during our exchange. Obviously a mom who thought I was taking the high ground without checking for back-up. But we don’t buy food because of commercials and Katy is well-versed in this now. Her last visit at Grandma’s also stirred up an urgent need for a game that consisted of a butterflies being projected into the air and caught by large nets and a Disney princess doll whose skirt changed color with a magic wand. The first was never discussed beyond “Hmm that’s interesting” and the latter was put on the Christmas list (this was in October) for further discussions with Santa.

This last trip found us lacking a Swifer for mopping the kitchen, some sort of fake cheese food called Cheese Me’s (as nearly as I can understand her) and something that she convinced herself she needs quite desperately – a Turtle tooth-tooth. 

“Brushing is boring, Mom, but not with the Turtle tooth-tooth. It plays music that goes up through your teeth and into your brain.”

“That can’t be a good thing,” was my husband’s first, last and only comment.

After a week of listening to Katy describe the delight of owning a tooth-tooth every night when she was forced to brush her teeth the “boring” way, I decided to google the darn thing. To my horror, it exists. It is an electric toothbrush that plays a single pop tune for two minutes and was designed by some well-intentioned (childless) dentist somewhere to get kids (and adults) to brush their teeth for the recommended two minutes of time it takes to throughly clean plaque and over crusted matter from our mouth. I played the commercial for my husband and he was appalled. More so when he saw that one of the songs was by Kiss and that Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons actually appeared in the web-based ad for their own tooth-tooth. 

“What fat hairy bastards they are now,” Rob was shocked. 

Whenever Katy talks about the tooth-tooth (it’s really called a Turbo Tooth Tunes), she lights up and dances about in glee. Though we have gotten her to agree that music being transported to her brain (the commercial actually shows this transfer of melody in a manner that causes me a bit of alarm) is probably not the healthiest thing for someone – she still wants a tooth-tooth. And I guess if the worst thing that results from her holidays with my folks, and their still quite liberal views of children and TV watching, is tooth brush lust – then we are pretty lucky parents.

Brood Brangelina


I used to read the celeb bashing news/blog Defamer quite a bit in the early widowed days. It was funny. Mean. Biting. Sarcastic. And really, really funny. Except for the grocery check-out displays of the obligatory mags designed to make me feel inferior and underprivileged in comparison to the rich and famous of the world (and whenever Rob visits WWTDD and reads me the more outrageous stuff), I don’t get much celeb news reverent or otherwise. However I was tag surfing here at WordPress and ran across a Defamer piece on Brad and Angie’s menagerie of wee ones that I had to share. Seems all is not peaceful or blended in a home with four very small children too closely spaced in age and acquistion. The boys fight and the girls fight and apparently all three of the adopted ones beat on the bio-baby. Not only that but in order to get a moment’s peace, Brad and Angie – the Dalia Lama eqvialents of parents – feed their children junk food! Makes you smile a bit, doesn’t it? To know that even parents with staff can’t crowd control any better than normal parents. What was really funny about the article was the comments. Most of the people replying shared stories of their own war-torn childhoods and sibling unrest. My own family is comprised of four children. We fall in a five year age span that conspired to make my mother’s life such that when warm weather finally arrived in the late spring, she would send us all outdoors as soon as breakfast was over and lock the screen doors, front and back, behind us. We were only allowed in to pee. If we needed water, there was a hose in the yard. At lunch she would call us to the picnic table and feed us sandwiches and kool-aid. Afterwards she would cart everything back inside along with anyone young enough to nap and the rest of us were locked out again until just before my father would get home from work. Nothing Brady Bunch or Mama Partridge about that. News that the oldest Jolie-Pitt son was beating on the younger reminded me of the many times I pummeled my little brother. Right up until the day he chased me through the house trying to poke me with a wooden pole attached to a flag we’d gotten for the fourth of July. I managed to slam my bedroom door shut just as he launched the thing at me javelin style. It drilled a hole right through the door. We covered it up with an Andy Gibb poster on one side and Shaun Cassidy on the other. It was a month or more before our mom discovered it and we were forced to confess to the hole’s origins. The hole is still there. My dad was too cheap to replace a whole door just for a little hole. Sibling spacing. A lesson for us all.