“Ugh! I don’t like Cinderella anymore, Mom.” My kindergartner stared at the buy-one-get-one underwear I picked up from Fred Meyer and wrinkled her nose.
“What do you mean you don’t like Cinderella? When did that happen?”
Truly, I don’t know.
For a while my daughter would acquiesce to anything with Cinderella slapped across it. Toothpaste, running shoes, workbooks; it really didn’t matter. You could have tied up chopped liver in Cinderella wrapping paper and my daughter would have at least tried a bite.
Cinderella always delivered. (Prince Charming was another story.) Cinderella, however, was dependable. It was shocking that her magic had worn off.
I took a hard look at the underwear package. Frankly, Cinderella didn’t seem like herself anymore. Her cheeks were a bit too plump and her forehead extra smooth. It was like she was the victim of Botox gone bad. Hawking herself out for every product known to girl-kind must have finally taken its toll.
Was Cinderella’s freaky new look the problem? “You know,” I said to my daughter. “When you stretch out Cinderella’s face in cotton she does look kind of weird. But I bet we could run her through the dryer and she’ll be just fine.”
“That’s not it.” My daughter shook her head at me in disgust. “I wanted Hello Kitty underwear, Mom. How could you not know?”
That’s a good question. Hello Kitty’s a pussy cat on the same level as Cinderella. She’s pink, white and all over town. Sanrio must be worth a gazillion dollars by now because they’ve figured out how to make people buy anything.
We own a Hello Kitty CD player, a piggy bank, a water bottle, a lunchbox and more. Everywhere I look Hello Kitty’s staring at me with her beady eyes and mute expression. Give that cat a mouth already, so she can talk.
Sometimes, when my kids are at school, I take a big load of toys to the Goodwill and then strategically leave the house really messy so nobody will notice that things are missing. But still, the big brands infiltrate our lives.
When I was a new parent, I was very conscientious of not letting my children’s hearts and minds be branded by giant corporations. We didn’t allow any Disney paraphernalia into the house until each kid turned 3. Shirts with characters or labels weren’t allowed until they were in preschool.
But once we relaxed the rules, things got intense very quickly.
Hello Kitty and Cinderella are regular members of our household. They play with my daughter’s brain and my pocketbook.
It’s easy to say “Don’t buy that stuff if you don’t want your daughter obsessed.” In actual practice, that’s harder than it sounds. But hey, nobody said parenting was easy.
So I guess I need to toughen up. The next time I buy underwear, it’ll be blank.
Jennifer Bardsley is an Edmonds mom of two and blogs at teachingmybabytoread.com.
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