Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes should actually be subtitled A Blueprint for Deprogramming Your Daughters. The authors are academics, – developmental psychologists, actually – but they make it clear in the introduction, that they are not writing as academics. Instead, they are writing as mothers, teachers, and women. True to their word, the book is written in an accessible language that most parents will find reassuring.
Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown write for their audience, and their word choices let parents know that you don’t have to be an academic to see through the marketing schemes aimed to brainwash your daughter. Throughout the work, their references to popular kids’ toys, songs, and celebrities demonstrate that they have done their research. What becomes clear early on is that the authors’ strategies simply boil down to more involved and active parenting. Following the suggestions of Lamb and Brown might mean that an already tough job is about to be tougher. But their in-depth analysis of what girls (and their concerned parents) are up against makes it easy to see the benefits of ratcheting the involvement up a few notches. If you get nothing else out of the book, you will learn ways to improve communication with your daughter – at several distinct stages of her development.
The book is divided into six chapters. The Introduction is followed by chapters on what girls wear, read, listen to, and do. These chapters provide parents with the necessary background for the sixth chapter. It is this chapter that makes the book an essential resource for parents. Entitled Rebel, Resist, Refuse: Sample Conversations with Our Daughters, this chapter offers resistance strategies that parents can use – without alienating their kids, something that is especially important as children enter the adolescent period that we all know so well. At just under 300 pages, the book looks intimidating. The good news is that it reads almost like a novel or a collection of really good magazine articles (or blog posts!) and doesn’t necessarily need to be read in one sitting or in chronological order. There is also an index for quick reference and a detailed guide to Online Resources for girls, teens, and parents.
Chapter 1, Pretty in Pink: What Girls Wearsets the tone for the book. Lamb and Brown cover topics like tattoos and piercings, Halloween, and most importantly the different girl types that are marketed to girls based on their age. The authors spend time in clothing stores and give a detailed report on the clothing (and increasingly accessories) that are being sold as paths to “girl power.” They name names here, and there are discussions on Limited Too, J.C. Penney, Hot Topic, and Claire’s among other retailers.
See No Evil?: What Girls Watchis the second chapter. Lamb and Brown spend several pages on Disney and their fantasyland monopoly on defining girlhood. Other animated female characters are discussed as well, but Disney’s saturation of the market justifies the time they spend sharing their observations. TV shows and movies for pre-teens, tween movies, extreme makeovers and adult-oriented shows like Friends and Sex and the City are discussed in this chapter as well. Highlights include a list of 15 questions you can ask your daughter about what she watches that will help become a more critical viewer and a list of “Movies That Feature Strong Girls and Fewer Stereotypes” (116).
The third chapter is entitled Do You Hear What I Hear: What Girls Listen To. Surprisingly, this chapter isn’t just about music lyrics. Chapter 3 covers music as well as gossip, and messages that girls receive in conversations at home, from peers, and from teachers. The section on “fat talk,” and the hidden messages that mothers send daughters about food, body image, and shame is especially interesting.
Chapter 4, “Reading Between the Lines: What Girls Read”, is just what it claims to be – an analysis of the books our daughters are reading. Included here are sections on books for little girls, pre-teens, and pre-teen through teenaged readers. The prize in the cereal box for this chapter comes at the very end: a list of “Books and Series That Have Strong Girls and Few Stereotypes” that the authors recommend, followed by a list of the same types of books from trusted librarians, authors and parents. This list can easily be photocopied and tucked away for trips to libraries or bookstores, or sent to relatives who don’t know what book to buy your daughter.
Chapter 5, “Wanna Play?: What Girls Do,” looks at the world of play for today’s girls. Included in the discussion are sections on social networking (MySpace and Instant Messaging), drugs, parties, physical play, games and toys. Highlights here include a discussion on the ever-controversial cheerleading and a fantastic section where the authors list the types of messages that aliens would receive about humans if they landed in the girls’ toys section of Toys “R” Us, Wal-Mart, or Target.
In the final chapter, the authors offer sample conversations for parents of younger girls, pre-teens, middle-schoolers, and teens. Each subsection has headings that reinforce the message the authors are sending: encourage your daughters to think for themselves and to begin seeing through the haze of marketer’s messages. For each age-level of girls, Lamb and Brown offer parents examples of strategies that include “Engage,” “Question, Listen,” “Be Honest,” “Don’t Argue,” “Don’t Be Afraid to Agree,” and “Reflect, Share Discomfort, and Provide Counterexamples.” The emphasis here is clear – conversations are much healthier and more productive than lectures.
Packaging Girlhood is a wonderful resource for many parents, and a great investment for those looking to intervene in the assault that media and marketers have launched on our daughters.
My 7-year-old daughter, Ainsley, was wedding crazed. Just looney over the whole wedding thing. Weddings are like crack for girls. It’s all that romance marketing. Eh, or maybe it’s just how we’re biologically programed. Either way.
I think it was one of the best weddings we’ve ever been to. They had the ceremony in the Mormon Temple in American Fork, Utah – stunning.
Of course, I snagged the opportunity to score a few family pics. It isn’t every day I can get the red-blooded American husband to wear an orange tie (the secret is to steal the ugly tie while he’s in the shower and replace it with the orange one and say, “I don’t know Honey, the bride said you must.”) Orange is Zack’s favorite thing to wear.
The reception was in a nursery. The colors were orange, hot pink, and lime green. Georgeous really. Isn’t that cake fantastic?
Guess what a general panic about a potential Swine Flu epidemic and an order from the President of the United States “to stay home if you have symptoms” brought to light?
That 40% of workers in the private sector don’t have a single paid sick day. So they can’t.
You already know that’s bad for families – maybe you’ve been hasselled for calling in sick – worried about missing pay while confronting medical bills for a sick kid, etc.
It’s an old story for moms.
It’s also an International Health Risk.
From MomsRising:
Paid sick days: Just common sense. Right now there is no law that guarantees people the right to earn paid sick days to take care of themselves or their children. In fact, the very industries where you would expect paid sick days to be required (to protect public health), like home health care providers, child care workers, and folks who work in restaurants and hotels, are the LEAST likely to have them. 1
On Thursday, the Congressional Education and Labor Committee’s Workforce Protections Subcommittee will be hosting a hearing on The Healthy Families Act. This bill would guarantee seven paid sick days per year for workers at businesses with 15 or more employees, to be used to recover from routine illness, care for a sick family member, or seek services to recover from domestic violence.
Tell your Congressperson to support the Healthy Families Act today. Click here to send a note directly to your Congressional Representatives.
I hate that bloggers spend hours of time doing research and writing great posts and after a day or a week it drifts off into the ether.
Think of all that great content out there just . . . not being read.
It’s a shame.
I was chatting on Facebook with my friend Amy Jussel, of Shaping Youth, who has tons of vital content on her site. She said she was thinking about taking the summer off.
I thought, Wait, what if bloggers didn’t waste all our fantastic content? What if we spend the summer copy and pasting our bloggy friends’ content on our blogs?
The benefits include these:
We expose our readers to our own favorite blogs, passions, interests and friends.
Our readers get new material all summer long.
We new eyes for our blogs by being featured on other blogs. (new eyes = new fans)
We get links that up our rankings.
Google still likes us for frequent posting.
We get to spend our summers with our kids and friends or working on other projects.
We get to read more blogs
We get to rejuice – writers need to rejuice.
The key is simple and easy for everyone. I’m talking about a summer of copy and pasting people.
Copyright rules apply, links and attribution MUST be included in any story.
If you want a post to be featured on The Girl Revolution send me the html code so I can paste it. As long as it’s appropriate and doesn’t violate girls or The Girl Revolution in any way, I’ll publish it.
If I stop by your blog and like a story you’ve written, I’ll email you or leave a comment telling you that I’m planning to copy, paste and run your story on The Girl Revolution. If that’s not acceptable to you – let me know and I won’t do it. If it is, feel free to stop by and Twitter, Facebook and Social Network your own story on my blog. Beautiful symbiosis isn’t it?
If you want to participate in Summer of Link Love 2009 - copy and paste this post in your own blog inviting your own bloggy friends to swap content. Grab the Summer of Link Love 2009 button, html code is right here – just copy and paste and pop it up on your own sidebar inviting friends to publish your content on their sites.
Three years ago, a newly formed company called BusRadio brazenly announced their intention to “take student-targeted marketing to the next level.” Their plan? Install “free” radio equipment on school buses across the country so that children would be forced to listen to advertisements, and to promotions for BusRadio’s commercial website, on their way to and from school. To a captive audience of students as young as six, BusRadio has promoted the highly sexualized Bratz dolls, television shows such as 90210 that glamorize teen sex and alcohol use, and a service that encourages children to look up the answers to their homework on the Internet instead of using their schoolbooks.
That’s why CCFC has made turning off BusRadio one of our featured campaigns. We successfully organized CCFC members in school districts around the country to stop BusRadio in their communities. Now, with your help, we have a chance to turn BusRadio off for good.
At CCFC’s request, the Federal Communications Commission will be reporting to Congress whether specially designed commercial radio broadcasts for school buses are in the public interest. As part of this proceeding, the FCC is now calling for public comment. CCFC is submitting extensive comments that detail the problems inherent in advertising on school buses and the hyper-commercial content of BusRadio. But we also need to demonstrate that parents all over the country are concerned about this commercial intrusion into the lives of schoolchildren. That’s why the FCC needs to hear from you, too.
Please click here to tell the FCC that listening to ads should not be a compulsory part of the school day. Submitting a comment only takes a couple of minutes (we’ll walk you through the process), and will help us reclaim our school buses from corporate marketers. And please encourage others to submit comments to the FCC by forwarding this email or clicking here.
Help us continue to protect the children you love from companies like BusRadio by supporting CCFC’s fiscal year-end campaign. We rely on you because we will not take corporate funding. Click here to make your tax deductible contribution.
