The Inevitable Princess Phase

Thanks to Grandma, we girls have tickets to see Disney on Ice: Princess Wishes at the 1st Mariner Arena next weekend while the boys stay home. My mother-in-law and I are pretty excited – we think this will truly blow Lucy’s mind and both of us love nothing more than to see our girl totally jazzed about something new. She’ll have a blast because she’s not only an admirer of figure skating (her Elmo slippers become ice skates on our hardwood floors); she is also relatively new to the Disney princess fold.

I don’t really remember how my daughter was introduced to the whole princess thing.

I seem to recall that the nurses at our doctor’s office gave her a big Cinderella sticker after she got a shot more than year ago, but I’m not sure it made much of an impression at that point. But for some reason she has really taken a liking to princesses in the past month or two. Lucy recently came home from school with two small princess magnets as a reward “for being a good listener,” she said. Her great aunt gave her a tiara and two “magic blondes” (that’s "magic wand" in Lucy speak) for Christmas. She has three princess Barbies and an assortment of merchandise related to the new movie Tangled that we never made it to theater to see. It’s safe to say we are solidly in Lucy’s princess phase.

There have been a lot of stories published lately about a new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture, which the New York Times’ Motherlode blog describes as “a nuanced look at whether or not the transformation of little girls into sparkly princess worshipers is just a normal stage, or the result of a deliberate assault by marketers.” My uneducated and relatively uninitiated guess is that the princess phenomenon falls somewhere in between.

I know a lot of moms are conflicted about their daughters’ affinity for princesses, but I’m trying not to be. After all, Lucy is only 3 years old. She has plenty of time to learn about how she doesn’t have to wait for a prince to come along to transform her life into anything she wants it to be. For now, I’m just enjoying watching her discover something new and flex her imagination.