We all have to pick our issues as parents. We are bombarded by the media and the next big fad on the market that will make Disney or Mattel billions of dollars. I know it will be a challenge for me, especially now that my firstborn is going off to the big world of kindergarten, but I’m sticking to my convictions of no bikinis, no boyfriends, no Bratz dolls. So far, none of this has been an issue.

My dd is surprisingly compliant when it comes to wearing a one piece bathing suit and has no problem dismissing Bratz so she can ogle over The American Girl doll catalog. Although the term boyfriend has come up, it isn’t quite a familiar term. School will introduce a lot of new things.

No Bikinis
I must sound incredibly conservative or just plain unrealistic to some of you. Well, I might be guilty of both. I think a lot of parents give into the culture and then are surprised by the innocence that is lost in their children. Bikinis are male eye candy and I never want my daughter to subject herself to being “checked out” - at 3 or 16.

No Bratz
I learned a lot from my daughter’s inspired-Waldorf nursery experience about the toys I buy. I was so attracted to the natural toys made of wood and the soft cloth dolls. It amazed me how few toys she needed because one toy could be used in so many different ways. A wooden cart became a stroller, a bed, a car, or a wheel barrow. I look at these new toys with their make up and glitter and hard plastic faces. These toys do not bring out the best in my child. These dolls want to be rock stars and they desire to be beautiful and perfect and desirable.

No Boyfriends
My parents did a beautiful job of making the relationship between a man and woman sacred. They didn’t forbid us to date, they just always talked about marriage. I remember my first crush in 6th grade. My dad took my crush very seriously and asked me if I thought Patrick would make a good husband or father. I looked at him incredulously, “Uh, no dad. He’s just a kid, like me.” My dad nodded and said how great it is to have friends but that love is something to save - that there is beauty and magic in the saving of it until one is old enough to act on it. I knew I always had the choice, but his philosophy and little “talks” about the beauty and magic of marriage stuck with me.

No Childhood
In “The Disappearance of Childhood,” Steve Berg says…

Fifteen years after its initial publication, Nefl Postman’s “The Disappearance of Childhood” remains perhaps the most insightful and provocative commentary on the decline of innocence in American culture.

Postman vividly describes ours as a society overflowing with doubletalk: We adore our children. Yet we insist on embracing a popular culture that is hostile and damaging to them.

We happily immerse ourselves - children and adults together - in the movies, TV shows, billboards, music, computer games and other pop influences that destroy the enchantment that childhood once held, Postman says. What’s happening, he says, is that adults are becoming more childish in these pop pursuits and that children, with all the secrets” of adulthood now revealed to them in prime time, are becoming more adult.

The idea of childhood is disappearing.

Writing a new preface three years ago for the re-released version of the book, Postman, who teaches media and political culture at New York University, confessed that, “sad to say,” he saw little to change in his 1982 text. “What was happening then is happening now. Only worse.”