There is one standing order that I’ve given my children with which they have never argued. When we see a woman or man in uniform, we go up to them and thank them for their service to our country. No exceptions. A few years ago Adam and I had a stark and unforgettable encounter with a veteran. We were out for lunch when we saw a young man in a wheelchair pull up to the table across from us. There was something about his demeanor that made me think this young man wasn’t in a wheelchair because he was reckless. And then I saw the Semper Fi sticker on the back of his chair.

“This man is a Marine,” I said to Adam.

My son didn’t have to be told what came next. He knew I’d learned it from my own father, a World War II veteran. Adam accompanied me to the man’s table. “I used to be a Marine,” the man said softly. We told him once a Marine, always a Marine. Adam shook the man’s hand and said, “Thank you for your service.”

“Any time, buddy,” said the Marine. “Any time.” His mother had tears in her eyes.

My children and I don’t know anyone personally whose sibling or parent is serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. All the more urgent for my kids to acknowledge a soldier. All the more urgent for them to seek out information in articles and books that will help them understand what families in our country sacrifice when a loved one in the Armed Forces is in harm’s way.

Novelist and playwright Laura Harrington published a novel in the past year that should be mandatory reading for parents and teens alike. It’s easy to remember the title, Alice Bliss. And it’s impossible to forget the eponymous protagonist. Alice is 15 and the older of two daughters. You see the deep father-daughter bond Matt and Alice share – a bond that’s already there when she’s a younger girl helping her father shingle a roof, trusting him as he coaches her through a bout of vertigo.

Matt, a National Guard reservist, signs on to fight in Iraq because he believes it’s the right thing to do. His patriotism is unquestionable, but there’s also a bit of the adventurer in his decision to ship out. Alice knows this about her dad in the same way that she knows that he can fix anything in the world.

When you read this quiet, contemplative novel, be prepared to be both enlightened and moved to tears. The book further piqued my curiosity about children with a parent deployed in a war zone. During the decade-long fights in Afghanistan and Iraq, the military has spent millions of dollars to train hundreds of American school counselors and psychologists to help children cope with the fear, confusion and the unthinkable. What if a parent returns with a physical injury? What if he or she needs psychological help? Or what happens if a parent doesn’t return at all?

As I surfed the Internet for information about kids with deployed parents, I imagined Alice Bliss doing the same thing in the bedroom she shared with her little sister. Skipping from link to link, I thought of my father refusing to answer a factual question. “Look it up,” he’d always reply. If I had been around when he served in World War II, how would I have borne his absence?

I eventually landed on a recent article in The New York Times that reported on the accommodations public schools near bases make for military families. If only fictional, Alice had been so lucky. Harrington is so good at capturing Alice’s isolation in her upstate New York community. She inhabits her character’s adolescent soul. When Alice is running off her fear and anxiety in a cross-country meet, we’re also short of breath and bumping up against hopelessness. Reading “Alice Bliss” is a visceral experience.

According to the Times, the public schools near Camp Lejeune, a military base in North Carolina, coordinate support services through the Marines with programs like the While You Wait Club. It’s a crowded club. Some 15,000 children in the area, including those of reservists, meet to talk, to journal, to draw – to do just about anything to make the waiting bearable. With a little luck and vigilance, counselors and teachers may catch a spiraling depression or notice mounting anxiety. According to a study published in the Journal of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, pediatric behavioral disorders steadily increase while a parent is deployed.

Maybe the study states the obvious, but the courageous Alice Bliss and her creator demonstrate that the obvious quickly becomes complex. Alice is a great character – an all-American girl that a military teen needs in her corner. She’s everyone’s daughter. And the Marine Adam and I greeted at lunch is everyone’s son

For the past two decades Peggy Orenstein has had her finger on the pulse of contemporary girl culture. The author of three acclaimed books on girlhood as well as a poignant memoir about her arduous journey to motherhood, Orenstein takes on mass marketing and the Disney machine in—Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture—her latest book just published in paperback.

Orenstein sends her dispatches from places as varied as toy fairs and the toddler-tiara pageant circuit. She doesn’t claim to be covering uncharted territory in these venues, but to be exploring these landscapes anew with a pink lens. For pink is the predominant color in this mega-industry of anointing Disney princesses and the glittery hoopla that comes with the coronation.

I love Orenstein’s unique take on “there is nothing new under the sun” when she writes that 5 year-old beauty contestants are like “museum portraits I had seen of eighteenth-century European princesses—little girls in low-cut gowns, their hair piled high, their cheeks and lips rouged red—that were used to attract potential husbands, typically middle-aged men, who could strengthen the girls’ families’ political or financial positions.” How different is that mindset from a mother telling her 6 year-old daughter that, “one of the judges is a man so be sure you wink at him.”

I spoke with Orenstein when her book was published in hardcover and she noted that the “Disneyfication” of the princess phenomenon boosted the company’s sales to 4 billion dollars last year. Here’s another statistic that astounded me: ‘Tween girls spend 40 million dollars a month on beauty products. These girls are doing a lot more than using Bonne Belle’s Lip Smackers. Ten year-olds are buying fruit-scented Nair to get rid of unwanted body hair. Eight to 12 year-olds are convinced that they need the anti-wrinkle cream that Wal-Mart markets to them. Wrinkles at 12? ? These are examples of a trend descriptively referred to as ‘kids getting older younger’ or KGOY.”

How did this insanity begin? When did it escalate? Here’s the short answer. Parents and grandparents have bought the complete princess package. For starters, a Disney survey reported that parents equated the word princess with safe. Accordingly, Disney has created a world where an infant’s onesie announces her royal status. From there it goes on to elaborate costumes that emulate princesses from Cinderella to Tiana—the first African-American princess in the Disney lineup. Companies dip DVD players, cameras and the more standard purses and jewelry boxes in pink.

In the midst of this marketing blitz, Orenstein acknowledged that as a Jewish woman she bristles at the word “princess.” “It was a slur for me growing up. It wasn’t something you aspired to. It brought up issues connected with materialism, which is why my traditional Jewish mother didn’t let me have a Barbie. She felt Barbie focused too much on clothes and looks.”

Orenstein, the mother of 8 year-old Daisy, is personally on the frontlines of girl culture. Daisy occasionally appears in Cinderella Ate My Daughter and it seems she’s a wonderful chip off the old block. When a girl layered in pink—pink helmet, pink bicycle—challenges Daisy’s preference for a green dragon helmet and neutral colored bike, Daisy tells her that her choices work for boys and girls.

Orenstein points out that Daisy is a little girl who’s as comfortable in overalls as she is in party dresses. Girls as well as boys are among her close friends. She’s also a little girl with a Japanese-American father who asks her mother why a Jewish person can be called a Jew, but a Japanese person cannot be called a JAP. Daisy will someday learn that the same racial epithet extends to Jewish women as well. Orenstein explains to her that, “meanings shift over generations.” The play on words leads Orenstein and me back to our conversation about the Jewish American Princess stereotype. “I think calling women JAPs ,” she says, “was a way for Jewish men to express self-hatred, discomfort with ethnicity and their own difference.”

Orenstein’s commitment to Jewish girls has also extended to serving as a curriculum consultant for Rosh Chodesh, It’s a Girl Thing. “It was important to me that a bat mitzvah not be seen as a bar mitzvah in drag, but as an aspect that belongs just to our daughters. I don’t want my Jewish womanhood to be generic or adapted from men.”

And how does Orenstein cope as a mother with this engulfing princess culture that attracts our girls like a moth to a flame? “I fight fun with fun. You can’t say no to everything, but you can give your girl broader choices to articulate her desires and her need to express herself as a girl.”