By Tracee Sioux

Have you gotten the four-page Hannah Montana Branding advertisement from Walmart?

Maddy gets ALL the Hannah Montana stuff! She has the wigs and the microphone and sleeping bag and DVD and CD. How come she gets it and I don't?

Hannah Montana is a Disney Channel sitcom and she's played by Miley Sirus, Billy Ray Sirus's daughter. She's a secret rockstar by night and a normal girl who goes to public school by day.

Last year Hannah was on our Not Allowed to Watch list because of her tone and the dating themes. But, I think we've established that Ainsley is getting her tone straight from the source - me - rather than Hannah.

I argued allow Hannah because she keeps Ainsley (and Zack) occupied while I write.

I've been contemplating doing a post about how the whole plot is propaganda to trick little girls into believing they really can have the best of both worlds (insert theme song music here) with the whole motherhood/career thing, without having to sacrifice anything.

But, since the Best of Both Worlds Tour commenced, the commando marketing is starting to get to me. Have you ever seen an entire four page ad dedicated to one celebrity brand? I can't say that I have.

Of course, Ainsley wants everything in it.

• socks
• shirts
• capris with Hannah's face on cuffs
• electric toothbrush
• gift card
• glasses frames (Hannah doesn't wear glasses)
• purse
• guitar purse
• watch
• t-shirts
• hats
• pajamas
• sleeping bag
• plates and napkins
• mini-wheats cereal
• song cards
• bedding set
• throw
• Nintendo system and games
• posters
• sticker card fun pack
• paperback books
• DVDs
• CDs
• Wigs in many different colors
• singing dolls
• doll paraphernelia
• electric guitar

With the concert selling out at reported $1,000 tickets Hannah mania is feeling more and more like a deranged attempt to seep funds out of parents' pockets.

The lesson here is to teach girls how to resist commando marketing.

No. You don't need all that Hannah Montana stuff.

It sounds so simple doesn't it? No. You don't need it.

I just haven't gotten a lot more creative than that.

Well, aside from my ordinary lessons on being a wise consumer:

Patience grasshopper, by spring I'll find loads of Hannah Montana stuff that spoiled girls demanded, recieved and grew tired of at garage sales.

I love the concept of allomothering, especially for daughters.

Allomothering is non-maternal infant care.

It usually refers to fathers, aunts, grandmothers or siblings of an animal caring for and nurturing it while mommy takes a break or goes out foraging.

While you'll never hear me say anyone can take the place of Mommy, there are benefits of providing as much exposure to other family members, friends, and caretakers and babysitters as possible. There are obvious benefits of allowing a child to be surround by many people who love them.

There are also benefits for girls to see how other women live and think. Women have been in dramatic transition in the last 30 years and different women have reacted in various ways.

Exposure to the different choices women make can only benefit daughters. There is no right or single way to be a woman - more choices for daughters is what I'm after.

If girls only see the one way their own mother's live out their chosen roles we rob them of exposure to all the other choices.

I believe there are also generational hangups that will take more than a single generation of women to iron out or correct. I'm hoping that Ainsley won't have such terrible guilt about working outside the home if that's where her dreams take her. I don't necessarily want her to work fulltime at an office, but any terrible guilt is is an undue burden I don't want to put on her.

Ainsley is quite lucky in that she has many women who are more than willing to allomother her. She has two sets of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, family friends, even three sets of great-grandparents.

My parents are coming to stay with the kids while I jaunt off with my man on a business trip to Atlanta for 5 whole days. I love that my parents are willing to do this and I love that Ainsley will have the attention, love, affection and interaction of others.

Exposure to a different way of doing things is healthy for girls to experience.

By Tracee Sioux

Good Job! You can do it! Get that ball! You're not afraid of her.

Good try. It's alright. It's okay to lose sometimes. I saw you run really hard after that ball.

Did you try hard and have fun? That's what's important! I'm so proud of you.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Attack! Attack!

Watch the ball.

Get in there and get the ball!

Attack! Attack! Attack!

Take a wild guess which dialogue is coming from the girls' coach and which is coming from the boys' coach.

There is plenty of evidence that five-year-old boys and girls have equal athletic abilities. Yet, the differences between these two soccer teams are startling.

Practice twice a week for boys, once a week for girls.

Encouraged to practice an hour per day for boys (by both parents and coach), no extra practice encouraged for girls.

Team names: Sharks for boys, Happy Feet for girls.

Focus on trying hard and having fun for girls, focus on winning for boys.

What do you think the consequences of these differences are?

By Tracee Sioux

My two favorite family television shows just revved up again on TLC Mondays with Jon & Kate plus 8 and Little People, Big World.

Little People, Big World is about Amy and Matt Roloff. They are little people or dwarfs. They have three average height children and one dwarf child.

Jon & Kate Gosselin were a normal couple with some fertility issues. They scored some twins with their first pregnancy and Kate convinced Jon they should have "one more." They got six. Oh and this poor mother is a compulsive cleaner with 6 toddlers.

Most reality television doesn't have any relationship at all to reality. These two families are REAL. They deal how I deal - with a tone. It's the arguing and bickering and real-life family interactions that keep me rolling in my seat the whole time.

When Kate gets all bossy with Jon in the toy store and then he tells her Stop talking to me like I'm a dog I laugh my head off. They took 8 small children to a toy store and that's the worst thing that happened. Ha! I see people with one whinny brat come out of the toy store worse off than that. Or they try to get sextuplets dressed to go somewhere and and finally Jon snaps Yes! I only told you 17 freaking times! and I'm just so proud of them for actually leaving the house.

When the Roloffs take their family on a road trip in a motor home, to see where Matt proposed to Amy, and they fight the whole time. Finally Amy goes on a rant:

Look at me! I do not want to leave trash in the fire pit! This will be enough to piss me off do you know that? I don't know why I even came. My God, you people argue about everything!

As someone who is trying to get a grip on her tone to improve her own slightly less than perfect family life these two shows are like pure love and joy to watch.

We may not talk to each other so nicely sometimes, but we're still here pulling for the same cause and that's evidence that we love each other, explains Kate. Here, Here Kate.

Kate and Amy are my modern-day mother heroes. I nominate them both for Mother of the Year.

by Tracee Sioux

The American Psychologocial Association has published a Report of the APA Task force on the Sexualization of Girls.

This 74-page report should be required reading for every mother, mentor, and educator. It contains a multitude of studies and evidence that girls are being negatively effected by being inundated with images and innuendos in all facets of culture that sexuality them.

Sexualization defined as:

* Valued for sexuality rather than other characteristics.

* Being objectified, made into a thing to be used for someone else's sexual use versus rather than being seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making.

* Sexuality is inappropriately imposed on a person.

Ample evidence suggests that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality and attitudes and beliefs, the report states.

* Cognitive and physical functioning. Perhaps the most insidious consequence of self-objectification is that it fragments consciousness. Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities. One study had girls unable to do well on a math test if wearing a swimsuit versus a sweater. The boys were unaffected by their attire.

* Sexualization and objectification undermine comfort with one's own body leading to feelings of shame, anxiety and even self-disgust. Vigilant monitoring of clothing or appearance leads to increased shame about one's body.

* Frequent exposure to cultural beauty ideals in the media has been shown to be associated with poor mental health including eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem.

* Studies show a link between sexualization and physical health. Girls who reported feeling negatively about their bodies were more likely to smoke and less likely to participate in sports or athletic activities.

* Frequent exposure to narrow ideals of attractiveness leads to narrow ideas about actual feminine bodily experiences like breastfeeding, menstruation, sweating and real sexual experiences.

* Frequent exposure to fictionalized images of sex made girls and women feel worse about real life sex.
Proposed solutions include:

* Formal education about healthy sexual and romantic relationships. Things like dating respect conferences.

* Comprehensive sex education in a human biology sense arms girls with the facts about their biological sexuality.

* Participation in athletics and extracuricular activities not of a sexual nature. Athletics that focus on stregth and competence increase self esteem.

* Religious and spiritual practices.

* Girl-centered groups and activities such as mentoring, Girl Scouts, and girl-related after school programs.

* Educating girls about how images in the media are produced and the profit motives behind advertising campaigns.

As a parent, mentor, woman, and journalist I find the findings of this paper to be consistent with what I'm seeing in girls and women.

Culture has meaning, the toys and clothes we allow our children to wear carry significance, the media they are exposed to has consequences. The statistical evidence suggests that perhaps we, as parents, are not taking it seriously enough.

It is my belief, and this is supported by the APA's report, that mothers are in the best and most appropriate position to impact a girl's self worth and to encourage a healthy sexuality. It's difficult to combat an entire culture with media images of sexuality, most of it inappropriate and disrespectful towards girls and women, invading nearly every facet of day-to-day-life.

It's difficult to draw the line and tune into warning signals our girls give us. My goal, and forgive me if I'm a fallible mother who finds the cultural and beauty myths difficult to interpret myself, is to give mothers a place where they can come and get a perspective that's a little different from the mainstream. Give mothers a place to sound off about cultural sexualization and how that's influencing their daughters. I intend to provide some tools to help mothers communicate with their daughters about sensitive issues.

It is our job, as parents, to interpret culture for our daughters.

The most interesting thing about Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton, to me, is that they look the same. Same hair, same skin tone, same fashion. Just very much the same. One of them is half-African American, but which one? Obviously, you know which one because you hear about them constantly, but if you didn't it would be hard to tell.

It's interesting that women all want to be the same color, only not the color we are.

Dark skinned women buy bleaching products to lighten the color of their skin to be more beautiful. While white women poison their skin with sun damage and tanning beds to look darker to be more beautiful. (I'm really regretting the tanning, now that I'm fighting melasma with bleaching products so I have one skin tone.)

Does this mean that Hispanic women, who presumably have the ideal medium brown skin tone, feel most beautiful? Or do they have skin-tone issues too?

I like the Olay tag line, Love the skin you're in.

by Tracee Sioux

One way to empower yourself and your family is to meet the neighbors. The theory behind National Night Out is that if your neighbors know you, they pay attention to who is coming and going from your house. You're less likely to be a victim of a crime if your neighbors are involved. The hope is that they'll say, Hey, that looks a little sketchy, and call the police should someone break in.

I remember having the run of the neighborhood when I was a kid. America was either safer then, or we just weren't aware that so many of our neighbors were terrible human beings not worth knowing.

I don't live in the best neighborhood in town. I know only one of my neighbors and he's a little off, given to random fits of screaming. I feel slightly guilty for judging these people, my neighbors, who are probably a mix of naughty and nice, without even knowing who they are.

Today I noticed lots of National Night Out signs in prosperous neighborhoods. Surely, if I lived in one of those neighborhoods I'd be more inclined to know my neighbors right?

It begs the question: Is it more empowering to acknowledge your neighbors if they are a little shady or vanish inside the house and group everyone in the whole neighborhood as "a stranger" for the benefit of empowering a daughter? According to the National Sex Offender Registry there are quite a few convicted sex offenders in my neighborhood and that doesn't make me want to run right out with a batch of cookies.

NATIONAL NIGHT OUT is designed to:
* Heighten crime and drug prevention awareness;
* Generate support for, and participation in, local anticrime programs;
* Strengthen neighborhood spirit and police-community partnerships; and
* Send a message to criminals letting them know that neighborhoods are organized and fighting back.

I saw one sign in my neighborhood a few blocks down. The lawn was mowed and the house kept up. Perhaps I'll stop by for some punch and cookies just so I can say I'm a part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Perhaps you should too.