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The princess industry has been booming in the past few years -- not just the 
Disney dolls and scratchy toy-store ball gowns that are a rite of passage in most American girlhoods, but a brazen new breed of princess products that target a far wider age range and tap into less seemly attitudes. The hot-pink, leopard-print princess backpacks, T-shirts, purses and bedspreads that girls are now buying (or, rather, their parents are buying for them) have little to do with indulging sweet princess fantasies and everything to do with catering to over-indulged princess egos.
Take the popular tween retailer Justice. At malls nationwide, it carries multiple "Princess" tops and accessories that look a lot more like Paris Hilton's attire than Snow White's. No surprise that part of its marketing slogan is "Love yourself."
For only $44 at Nordstrom, you can dress your toddler in a tank top that declares her to be a "Juicy Couture Princess" -- that is, someone whose parents can afford to buy designer shirts that will end up stained with ketchup or jelly. And until recently, numerous Saks stores maintained Club Libby Lu, a spa for 5- to 13-year-old girls offering princess makeovers with tube tops and miniskirts that left girls looking more like Real Housewives than Cinderella. The ailing retailer closed the tween operation in May, but it grossed $60 million in 2008.
Call it trickle-down narcissism. Today, even as the economic crisis continues, many middle-class parents aspire to give their daughters the best of everything, "the best" meaning the most expensive. A quick tour around suburbia will show princess-themed bedrooms (the rhinestoned-and-feathered kind, not the cartoon-character kind) and ostentatious birthday parties, as well as pedigreed dogs being toted in designer bags by 10-year-olds. Maintaining a diva daughter has become one more way to one-up the Joneses.
Sadly, even believing Christians are participating in the princess push. Christian retail outlets like A Different Direction carry "God's Girlz," glamour dolls dressed in princess shirts and spandex with sparkling tiaras on their heads. St. Paul may have exhorted women to be modest in their dress, but many church-going girls proudly wear Christian-marketed clothing imprinted with messages like "Yes, I am a Princess." The small print underneath -- "I'm a daughter of the King" -- is supposed to differentiate the sentiment from secular princess gear (never mind that the King's firstborn declared himself not a prince but a servant of all.)
Of course, it's natural for kids to try to assert their status over others, but it used to be the role of parents to rein in these impulses and teach their daughters that while playing princess is fun, no one enjoys being around someone who acts like a princess in real life. Now researchers are finding that parents are promoting attitudes of superiority in their daughters. Jean Twenge, associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, tracks the rising egotism on college campuses in her new book, "The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement." She has found that college-age women are developing narcissistic traits at four times the rate of college-age men. She attributes the startling discrepancy in part to parents who put their girls on a pedestal.
Ms. Twenge describes moms and dads who lavish their daughters with unrealistic praise. Parents not only tell girls they are the prettiest and smartest but also train them to see themselves as the center of their worlds through clothes and accessories. "You could label that kind of parenting 'princess parenting,' " she told the Associated Press recently. Ms. Twenge notes wryly that when shopping for her own 2-year-old daughter, about "a fourth of clothing available to her says 'Little Princess' on it."
While there's unlikely to be much harm in indulging in one or two princess products, Ms. Twenge and other experts find that girls immersed in princess culture are embracing the notion of privilege that goes along with it. While parents may hope that princess-pushing will give their daughters confidence in the future, research shows that such girls later have trouble adjusting to professors, bosses and potential mates who don't automatically treat them as royalty.
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FYI: I am leaving tomorrow for a Mission Trip and will be gone a week. I most likely won't get the chance to post anything new next week, but will return June 30. Checkout some of the older posts and comment if you'd like! Until then... C2
Image: Sara Schwartz (appeared in original article)
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2 comments:
If there were no Hollywood, 1920s consumer culture, 1950s Affluent society, and parents who see the need to give their children everything in the world so they can shut them up, there would be no "glamour," "We are all princesses," "look at me! I'm so pretty and popular and cute," "Mommy, buy me this, get me that! I NEEEEEEED IT!" But...that's our society. We have a choice. We can choose to conform, or we can choose to be different and not feed into or be apart of this culture that teaches that being pretty is essential in getting a mate, getting a job and earning outstanding wages, and just plain getting what you want. It's sad. It's annoying. It takes away from what's important- education, rational thinking, good judgement, and self- control. Instead of teaching kids, teens, etc. that you cannot get your way all the time and that it is much more valuable to this nation to be productive people in the area of logic and morality, society teaches that you have to be beautiful according to some made up standards in order to succeed. Perhaps the problem is that society is doing the teaching and not the parents. The "my child is a princess" ideology ultimately takes away from what we all should be focused on, and that is God and His work. Things of this world are not His work nor His promise. All of this will fade away. That doesn't mean we need to have as much of it as we can now, that means we should embrace our eternal treasure and not that of society's treasure, which just creates means for sin (society's treasure produces this).
If the economy continues like it has over the last 8 months, then it will prety much take care of about 75% of the fake "princess" attitude. Money isn't the root of evil, but it is a pretty big root of that problem.
The real problem is lazy parenting that has fueled the fake "princess" misconception. In the time before the recession, I typical call it the time of "possession," money could buy anything this world could afford. Instead of showing young girls and teenagers how to be real princess, heirs to the Kingdom, parent just threw possesions and false responsibility at them, dumping their "real" responsiblity as parents.
If there is a time period to blame for the current rise in this attitude, then blame the atomic age parents for sitting their baby boomer generation in front of a television set instead of raising them the way they should have.
"Hey, let's let technology raise our kids so we can have more time to ourselves. We'll just throw values, morals and any truths that God gave us out the door. They'll eventually grow up and find their own way anyway."
Repercussions sometimes take generations to reveal themselves
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