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Strollerderby
Are teen fashion trends really heading towards less trashy looks?
Parents everywhere can breathe a sigh of relief over this New York Times’ back to school fashion piece: teenage girls are tired of tight clothing.
Skimpy is out; “grandma chic” is in. Girls are shopping for oversize sweaters and high-waisted jeans this fall, leaving the miniskirts on the rack.
Almost nothing makes me want my own daughters to grow up faster, but if this fashion trend is real, I kind of wish it were happening during their teen years. I’d love for them to come of age at a moment where girls’ are encouraged to develop their sense of style and beauty without being pressured to show off their bodies.
In a somewhat extreme move, a British school is enforcing a ban on make-up by removing the mirrors from the girls’ bathrooms. They’ve also issued “make-up removal kits” to teachers to deal with any make-up applied before school hours.
The school is co-ed, but the rule applies only to girls. I guess boys wearing too much eyeliner wasn’t a big problem this year. The school administrators say the issue isn’t just that heavy make-up can be distracting, but that girls were congregating in the bathrooms to stare at themselves and tweak their make-up instead of focusing on school. Some of them were even bringing their lunch into the school bathrooms.
Miranda Cosgrove's new album, High Maintenance
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine was dubbed “the youth issue” (note lowercase). The cover story: Peggy Orenstein’s fascinating profile of Miranda Cosgrove, star of Nickelodeon’s iCarly, and TV’s good girl of the moment. Cosgrove is carrying the torch once held by Miley Cyrus, which begs the question: Will Miranda Cosgrove mirror the Hannah Montana star’s very public fall from grace?
Like Miley before her, Miranda Cosgrove is packaged as spunky and sassy without being sexual. Miley shed that image in a few fell swoops and scantily clad photo shoots. So far, the iCarly star is supposedly content with her “golden girl” image. But is it only a matter of time before the weight of being a respectable role model to younger girls begins to clash with the teen’s need to carve out her own grown-up identity?
According to Orenstein, author of the popular new book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, the squeaky clean image of these tween and teen girl stars may actually be part of the reason for their rebellion.
The fact that teens have discovered the joy of sexting is not surprising. Clandestine conversation and flirting with the forbidden are the meat and potatoes of adolescence. But unlike notes passed in the classroom, or even obscene phone calls, sexting has the added risk of becoming very, very public.
When this happens, which seems to be disturbingly often, lives are forever changed. And those lives are disproportionately the lives of girls. Young girls’ participation in even mutual revealing exchanges has the power to ruin reputations in a very long term, very old school way, marking them with the record of their indiscretions.
Here’s why girls are so much more vulnerable:
Is your daughter herself online?
According to a new survey conducted by Girl Scouts of the USA, lots of teen girls are using social networking sites to communicate with their peers. This should surprise absolutely nobody.
But what might surprise some parents is the fact that when their girls go online, many of them become someone else. In an effort to appear cooler, they downplay many of their positive characteristics to present an image of a fun, funny and socially confident girl. Continue reading »
Thanks to airbrushed celebrities and a cultural preoccupation with thinness, many teen girls have issues with their own bodies. And it’s not just overweight girls who long to be skinnier. Girls of normal weight and even those who are underweight often have difficulty seeing themselves the way they really are. Scientists have a name for what is going on the minds of these non-overweight girls who view themselves as fat: Body image distortion. Continue reading »
Last week, The Baby Website released the results of a survey in which parents of grown children were asked to name the age at which their kids were most difficult to parent. Not surprisingly, the teen years beat out the so-called terrible twos when it came to parental challenges. While the survey respondents reported that their formerly sweet boys became moody, sullen and uncommunicative at age 15, girls were said to hit the wall at the age of 14.
Parents of those sulky 15-year-old boys mostly chalked up their bad behavior up to hormones caused by puberty, an admission that these poor guys are just victims of their own bodies and doing the best they can during a difficult time of life. Girls, however, weren’t given such a pass. Parents reported feeling that the main issue with their teen girls was that while they were “turning into women overnight,” their behavior was regressing to that of a toddler, complete with meltdowns and temper tantrums. Continue reading »
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