Lauren:  Mom, check out this pink purse—isn’t it cool?

Mom:  I like it, but did you see this one in green?

Lauren: But all the girls have this purse!

Mom:  I know girls who don’t even carry a purse. I bet you do, too.  Let’s talk about why this style is so popular.

Does a trip to the mall ever feel like a minefield? You start out having fun with your daughter, but so often the good times get dragged down by your conflicting feelings about what she insists she wants, and your frustration about what’s being “sold” to her.

It’s likely that she’s simply trying to respond to the nonstop messages she gets about how to be the “right” kind of girl. These messages focusing on what she should buy, watch, hear, read, wear, and do constantly surround her, and as parents we aren’t immune to them either. Yet we often feel helpless to counter the power of these relentless claims that media and marketers put on our girls.

While it’s tempting to just tell her “No!” more often, there’s another option that’ll get much better results, say psychologists Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown. Parents can team up with girls to learn how to “read” the girl culture that’s being marketed to them, and then talk together about how she’d like to react to the sell job. Lamb and Mikel Brown’s how-to, Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers’ Schemes (St. Martin’s Press, 2006), can help get these discussions going.

Our conversations must include lots of listening as our girls explore the reasons they want what they want. “Parents need to acknowledge that girls like a lot of what marketers are offering them,” says Lamb. It helps girls when we also talk about why we buy the things we buy, and how our desires may be linked to marketing. Once they see we’re sympathetic to their urge to buy, they’ll be more open to listening to how marketing works—by making us feel we aren’t good enough the way we are.

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