My daughter is 9 next week.  I want her to be 9.  I work hard to keep the child in her alive and defer her teenage years until she is at least, oh I don’t know, let’s say thirteen.  So that can’t be so hard?

You’d hope not, but this is a great example of the kind of thing which sets me off: ‘Boob-Job piggy bank’.  I was going to link to the original site, but don’t want to give them the pleasure of the page views…  Thanks to Karmadillo for sending that one through.

Why ever would you present that as a purchase for a child?  Or frankly an adult, but that’s a whole different blog post.

This article gives some good clues; Kids Today are growing up way too fast.  “Marketeers call them “tweens”: kids between eight and 12, midway between childhood and adolescence. But tweens are becoming more like teens, leaning more and more toward teen styles, teen attitudes and teen behavior at its most troubling” 

And the striking findings reported in that article place a large part of the solution firmly at my door:  “Kids are on their own, goes the premise”.  Parental absence (they suggest through parents working long hours without reference to full time absenteeism) is a major factor in this.  

Phew, so glad I work for an organisation that gets it: one which allows me to reduce my working hours and do them flexibly, so I can pick her up from school and take her to her activities – or just flop in front of a film together.

So ironic though, that I should be the one sitting at home alone, with no real plans for the day whilst I write this.  An absent child… My daughter, out all day acting her heart out with a bunch of creative tweens.  Her peers are where, why “up town” of course indulging in the “fad-crazed marketplace” of the greedy marketeers.

And me, well I think I’ll just pop up town, see you later…