A few different folks have sent me this review on Slate of a new book by Peggy Orenstein entitled “Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture”. I haven’t read the book yet, but this review makes some interesting points.

Here is one of the more interesting excerpts from the review:

“She interviews the Disney exec responsible for the birth of the Disney Princess concept that, 10 years later, has landed some permutation of Ariel, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, or Belle in every American household containing a girl-child between the ages of 2 and 10. The exec suggests that Disney princess props allow girls to expand their imaginations. Instead, Orenstein finds that during a drawing exercise at her daughter’s preschool, boys imagined themselves as everything from animals to insects, snack foods to superheroes, while girls were uniformly princesses, fairies, butterflies, or ballerinas.”

As a mother of 2 daughters, we have let princess & fairy products into our house. And even some Barbies too. But this quote reminds me how important it is to continue to stretch our girls - to shoot hoops with them (something I did last night), to hike with them, and to do all we can to stretch their imagination and their sense of themselves.