Disney

As many of you will know, I am quite the avid fan the Disney classics animations. Many are committed to memory and I will happily sing along on a regular basis to most! I also think that the partnership with Pixar was a stroke of genius as they are innovative and original.
However, I must have a rant about my latest sad discovery about the Disney machine. High School Musical is a phenomenon that I think few predicted. Everywhere you go you see children (very young children, I will add) wearing the merchandise and dressed as cheerleaders. Most of such outfits are not what one could call modest!
Yesterday we visited Asda (walmart, for those of you reading across the waves) and there to celebrate the release of HSM 3 was a line of clothing for girls as young as 4 in the style of those clothes worn by the "stars" of the show! One such dress was pink and covered in sequins... Ana, of course, made a bee line for it and held it up to her body and swished her way ecstatically around the shop.
I let her swish.
Then she wanted to by it, apart from it being ridiculously expensive for what it was, it was not the type of dress that a four year old should wear. It had spaghetti straps, a shaped bodice, and looked as though it was cut for a 25 year old woman. We talked about why we would not be buying the dress, including the price and the lack of coverage for the shoulders and she understood all of that, but, "it's pink and sparkly, Mummy!". This seemed to negate all the bad stuff and make the dress wearable in her mind.
So I said, that I would not be buying a four year old a dress that looked like it should be worn by a 25 year old and that was that... she took it as final, the love affair with the sparkles ended and she went to find another princess dress to swish in. ( I was profoundly grateful for the ease of this redirection!!!)

However, a lady in the shop overheard me and applauded what I was saying and what I was doing in making a stand to not have little girls dress as mini women. (It is nice to have some encouragement of one's parenting choices every once in a while!)

She was correct and I feel very strongly about this too. Children are not "allowed" to be little at all these days. Party dresses and best clothes are skimpy, immodest and far too "old" for the bodies they adorn. Parents actually seem to encourage their children to dress in a provocative and alluring manner. It actually scares me somewhat. Will my children have the strength to walk against this sweeping tide?
Well, one thing that I can do to help them is make sure that I am walking against it too! They can walk in my wake until they are strong enough to take on the current themselves.
I think that I will write a letter to Asda and complain about such dresses being available for such young girls and express my concerns.
What else is there to do? I wold love to boycott the places selling such clothing, but unfortunately, without Asda and it's low prices, my children and I would have no new clothing at this time in our lives! ... Perhaps that is a sacrifice worth making to get dress standards higher?