Miley Cyrus "Topless" Photos: Media Manipulation and Puritanical Frenzy

Puh-leeeze! I know I will get backlash for my opinion but have you seen the Vanity Fair photo that the media has labelled "topless"? Get real! I've seen more skin on 5 year olds at the neighborhood swimming pool! The media has sold us a bill of goods and now all of us lemmings are up in arms.

Have we learned nothing? Go back as far as fairy tales like Snow White and Rapunzel (and countless others) where teenage girls are shut away or "killed" because of their burgeoning sexuality. Read "Raising Ophelia" or "Queen Bees" to see modern day examples of parents in fear of their daughter's sexual maturation. It is a difficult time to be sure, but there is nothing any parent can do to stop it short of parenting them the best that we can.

Lin Burress who writes a great blog entitled, Tellin' It Like It Is, believes these photographs taken by Annie Liebowitz are offensive and illustrate the decline of parental moral values. A rash of vitriol broke out amongst her commenters arguing over whether or not our children are going to hell in an overstuffed Bratz-filled hand basket.

In Lin's defense, I do agree we have a huge problem with the premature sexualization of our children as she reports so well in this post; but I do not believe the VF photos are a symptom, a cause, or in any way relevant to that argument.

I don't think it was the best image choice for today's teenage "IT" girl but I think it was purely that - a matter of choice. Miley Cyrus is, at this point, one of the only if not THE only teen idols not yet besmirched by drugs, alcohol, late-night partying, sex, and teen pregnancy. Do we really think this merits the same lambasting as Paris, Lindsay, and Britney? At this rate, we'll never find a true teenage idol- idol should not mean idealized. No true teenager could stand up to that standard - we do not live in the age of Sandra Dee and Gidget.

Give the girl a break. Do you think it's easy living your young life in the spotlight? It's destroyed many before her. So she's got boyfriends, many girls her age do, they just don't have cameras and reporters following their every move. Can you imagine? Have you been to a high school campus lately? And if you think that supports the argument against Miley's photos just think back to your own high school days of make-out sessions, midriffs, short shorts and god knows what else you were doing that you didn't want your parents knowing about. A bare back is not the reason so many of our kids are screwed up.

Miley's got talent and moxie (yes, I said moxie) which sets her apart and is the reason for her success. She lives in a fast world where sex, drugs and money are the norm. She is rushed each day by corporations and individuals wanting something from her be it an autograph or a bite-sized piece of the Hannah Montana pie. Disney does an amazing job in this fast-paced, global culture of appealing to our hip kids while helping us keep our children children for as long as possible. I think we need to give them and the Cyrus family a bit more credit.

Maintaining innocence is not an easy job these days, apart from this bit of poor judgment, they're doing it better than anyone. As a parent who has reluctantly watched almost every episode of Hannah Montana, not to mention the Suite Life of Zack and Cody and others, I am thrilled that my children prefer Disney Channel to Nickelodean where shows like Drake and Josh endlessly portray kids in search of make out time and in one episode actually used the word scumbag twice. (That brought the show to a close in my house.) Where were the critics for Full House or other "sweet, family" shows from the '80s? This iconic show of a loving family teaching loving, family life lessons has in it more kissing and sexual innuendo than any episode of Hannah Montana I've seen to date.

I don't love that my kid's idol has been seen flashing her bare back and tummy but who is the audience for Vanity Fair (she's NOT on the cover!) and YouTube? If you let your kids read or watch either of these they can find something way more offensive than this. Sure, now I'll have to have a conversation with my kids about these photos because they're "out there" but I had a much harder time talking to them about Jamie Lynn's pregnancy and Britney's maternal wake of destruction.

Mistake? Poor choice of Miley's? Yes. Debacle. End of childhood as we know it? Definitely Not.

The First Amendment is here to stay people. We must deal with these issues in the home. It's our responsibility as parents to supervise what they have access to and to explain the world as it is to our children not shelter them from it. It's a universal culture out there, countries and cultures that existed for us in textbooks and pictures are real and accessible to our children through the internet. Teach your children how to handle all the information that's thrust at them, embrace the technological revolution and all the messy stuff that comes with it.

You have no choice - your kids are going there with or without you.

IN A PERFECT WORLD SOMETIMES GOOD IS GOOD ENOUGH

For four months the writer's strike forced people in my town to cutback and reconsider their financial priorities. Some barely felt the pinch of a comatose economy while others didn't survive it. Those in the middle adapted and survived.

During this time of financial re-evaluation I realized how easy it has become to delegate our parenting responsibilities to others. We live in an era where excellence is the norm, pushing ourselves to reach the same maximum ability as our technological gadgets and passing this goal of excellence onto our children. Their world is faster than ours was at their age and we expect them to achieve earlier and better than we did in order to compete. We give our hard-earned money to professionals to train our kids for the marathon of modern life - private schools, tutors, trainers, therapists. In some situations professional consultation is necessary but many parents, feeling overwhelmed by self-imposed expectations and inadequacy, seek out experts who they believe can handle the demands better than themselves.

I recognize this is most prevalent in big cities like mine but I think it applies on some level to everyone. I know of parents who enroll their kids in private school expecting the school to churn out perfect children with perfect critical thinking skills, perfect SAT scores, and perfect manners - their money buying them perfect visions of themselves. I hear of countless others who place themselves on the brink of financial ruin in order to enroll in these same schools. They cause stress in their marriage and their family not wanting to give their child anything less than the best. Some students thrive in these challenging environments going on to college with an academic knowledge deeper and better than from any public school but many students do not. It's these children that pay the price for our super-charged, supremacy-seeking, education-budget challenged society. The time they spend struggling with an accelerated curriculum meant for a minority of students is time away from self-discovery in alternative forms such as sports, music, reading for pleasure, or just goofing off.

A boiling teakettle lets off steam to release pressure - our children are like little teakettles. We risk them exploding or burning out if we don't let them play during the only time in their lives when they can without guilt or judgment.

We make things worse by sheltering our children from disappointment starting at a young age. We lavish them with praise and accolades. We let them win at cards and board games to protect them from frustration and failure. How does this prepare them for real life? We immunize our kids to build up their resistance to disease, why not the same for disappointment?

I believe in therapy, it is the reason I am happy with who I am today, and before we instituted our family cutbacks, I depended on our therapist for my children's every emotional misdemeanor. I worried about my daughter's shyness and withdrawal and my son's tendency to be explosive. I wrote down every piece of advice our therapist gave us and kept the notes in my night table drawer for frequent study. I heeded her words more than I did my own instinct. Surely, some kids do need professional help but I risk saying that many would do as well or better with genuine parental nurturing and supervision. We're all looking for the easy answer, the explanation, the quick fix, but with time off the perfection treadmill and only my gut to guide me, my family is no worse for wear. We err, we survive.

It takes as much time to drive our kids to the tutor as it does to spend quality time with them. We'd have to educate ourselves on our specific subjects but don't we all read parenting books and research the internet anyway? The trick is to trust ourselves. If we do, we might come to the conclusion that we are more capable of raising our children than we give ourselves credit for. Paraphrasing parenting expert Wendy Mogul, author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, we don't need to be perfect, sometimes good is good enough.

I'd go so far as to say sometimes good is better.