Not Another Tween Beauty Crisis
Want to know if another generation of kids is headed for holy hellfire? According to Salon’s Broadsheet, just check out Newsweek.
Broadsheet’s Amy Benfer has pulled Newsweek
articles from now, the late nineties, early nineties and the eighties
that all say the same thing: today’s tween girls are growing up too
fast, they’re skankier than the previous generation of tween girls,
they know too much about naughty things, aaaack. Avert your eyes!
What prompted the rant? A Newsweek article on Generation Diva, a comment on the trainwreck that is TLC’s Toddlers and Tiaras that attempts to define the new normal as “a generation that primps and dyes and pulls and
shapes, younger and with more vigor.”
Author Jessica Bennett says, “Girls today are salon vets before
they enter elementary school. Forget having mom trim your bangs, fourth graders are in the market for
lush $50 haircuts; by the time they hit high school, $150 highlights
are standard. Five-year-olds have spa days and pedicure parties. And
instead of shaving their legs the old-fashioned way
I polished my son’s nails when he was 3 and the other two were 2 and 4. They loved the sparkle.
I’m 41 and my mom used to do my nails when I was little…so what???
In the book The Culture of Fear, there are lots of examples of things like this, how the media is constantly saying that the new generation is so much worse, when things are really not that different. He talks about the “crisis” of kids not eating dinner with their parents, which he shows the media talking about since the 20′s! I think people often don’t remember how things really were when they were kids, and it makes them feel better to say that the younger generation is so much worse than their generation was.