Boston by Train

Just a week until we leave for Boston. So much to do!

Getting Ready for the Boston Shoot

Photo © 2005 by B*tween Productions, Inc.

Im working on questions for the Boston trip. Donna is focusing on the academic interviews and Im focusing on B*Tween Productions CEO Addie Swartz (pictured above) and Marketing Director Bobbie Carlton. I am very excited to talk with them both about their vision, their company and the process they went through (and continue to go through) in keeping their mission and products in line with one another. I realised today while combing through their website that I need to become more familiar with their brand. So today Im going to order some things from the site and use these and the website to formulate my first draft of interview questions this week.

For now...here's an excerpt I pulled from the PARENTS section of their site. Its from Addie's letter to parents.

"As parents, you and I know that tweens are facing a period of tremendous change. My girls had outgrown their dolls and toys but were nowhere near ready for the bombardment of mature messages that greeted them at every turn (we call it between toys and boysTM.) I was frustrated by the lack of appropriate books, products, and online material available. I wanted a world designed specifically for them that was both fun and inspirational.

Girls between 9 and 13 deserve their own world, a place that speaks to them about issues they care about, in their own language. They shouldn’t have to "make do" with teen products that have been scaled-down or tweaked. Teen books deal with topics unsuited to a younger audience; the emotions run high and the language is often inappropriate.

The Beacon Street Girls use media in positive ways - to help girls reflect on, understand, and deal with some of the difficult issues of growing up.

Creating responsible media that girls feel connected to doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and it doesn’t happen overnight. We spent our first few years just talking to girls from a variety of backgrounds, exploring their challenges, interests, and aspirations. Then we consulted with developmental experts. Finally, we assembled a creative team to bring the Beacon Street Girls to life. Through the book series and online media, girls follow the adventures of twelve-year old Charlotte, Maeve, Katani, Avery and Isabel as they come-of-age. Wholesome and engaging, our readers tell us the girls are "just like me."

The Beacon Street Girls series invites tweens into a rich, contemporary world where values and community service matter, and friendships are important. It isn't enough for us to dispense platitudes. Our characters are based on real girls with diverse backgrounds, working out realistic solutions to real-to-life challenges. They are joyful and well rounded, but they’re not perfect. Our readers follow their adventures as they navigate their way though middle school: making decisions, making mistakes, building confidence and self-esteem at their own pace, and having fun in the process.

At B*tween Productions, we have every confidence in girls. Given the right environment, images and tools, they will make smart choices and create successful, confident futures. Our goal is to make that journey a bit easier and more fun."

ivillage has a tween category

For some reason it just struck me as odd that ivillage has a tween section now. It feels so official. So concrete. Like if ivillage has a tween section then that's that. The categories go like this: Trying to Conceive, Pregnancy, Newborn, Baby, Toddler/ Preschooler, Grade-Schooler, Tween, Teen. If you have a question about parenting click on one of the links. Tween is now an official choice.

hmm...

Sample articles on ivillage. In case this rant is of any interest to you.

Is your tween ready to babysit?
The AgebyAge Guide to Disney World
Helping Your Daughter Not Hate Her Body
The 5 Secrets of Raising Healthy Eaters
Getting Preteens to Do Their Chores
Which Oscar Nominated Films is your child ready for?
When do children lose their baby teeth?
Tale of the Tickets: A guide to family movies
Sexual Harassment in Schools Is Not "Routine Adolescence"
Middle School Crisis
Are We Labeling Our Kids Instead of Understanding Them?
Why Janie Can't Engineer
Girls' Cliques: What Role Does Your Daughter Play?
A Clique First-Aid Kit
Teasing, Gossiping and Reputations
Generation Zen: Yoga for Youngsters

Lines drawn for tween market- Celebrity designers tap into spending power

From Variety another current article (March 29, 2007) looking at the tween explosion. Excerpt below. Click on the title above to get to the full article which is full of relevant information for the project.

Lines drawn for tween market - Celebrity designers tap into spending power
By DIANE CLEHANE

Move over, baby boomers. Tweens are where it's at.
According to industry sources, there are approximately 25 million tweens -- kids between the ages of 7 and 14 -- in the United States who spend $50 billion a year. Other estimates report these kids influence another $200 billion in purchases.

That's a lot of T-shirts and lip gloss.

The phenomenon hasn't gone unnoticed by fashion companies and celebrities looking to tap into the buying power of the grammar- and middle-school set.

"The tween market explosion coincides with an explosion of edgier celebrity-driven fashion," says David Wolfe, creative director of the Doneger Group, a New York-based trend forecasting agency. "Because of the amount of coverage given to celebrity style in the magazines and on the Internet, tweens are following the trends like never before."

For years, there were relatively few stores like Limited Too catering to these fledgling fashionistas. These days, an increasing number of celebrity-driven tween lines are popping up to fuel the fashion frenzy.

However, it's hard to imagine any newcomer to the game coming close to the success Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have had with their megabrand.

Their company, Dualstar Entertainment Group, licenses a slew of products that includes books, straight-to-video movies and dolls. In 2001, the Olsens inked an exclusive deal to sell their clothing line, the Mary-kateandashley brand for girls 5-12 at Wal-Mart.

"They were doing it long before the word 'tween' even existed," says Dualstar's CEO Diane Reichenberger.

For Girls, It's Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too

Just saw this in the NYT today and thought it was a relevant story to post here. So here's an excerpt. Get the full story by clicking on the title above (it links to the actual full story).

For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too
By SARA RIMER

NEWTON, Mass., March 31 — To anyone who knows 17-year-old Esther Mobley, one of the best students at one of the best public high schools in the country, it is absurd to think she doesn’t measure up. But Esther herself is quick to set the record straight.

“First of all, I’m a terrible athlete,” she said over lunch one day.

“I run, I do, but not very quickly, and always exhaustedly,” she continued. “This is one of the things I’m most insecure about. You meet someone, especially on a college tour, adults ask you what you do. They say, ‘What sports do you play?’ I don’t play any sports. It’s awkward.”

Esther, a willowy, effervescent senior, turned to her friend Colby Kennedy. Colby, 17, is also a great student, a classical pianist, fluent in Spanish, and a three-season varsity runner and track captain. Did Colby worry, Esther asked, that she fell short in some way?

“Or,” said Esther, and now her tone was a touch sarcastic, “do you just have it all already?”

They both burst out laughing.

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do.

But being an amazing girl often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing girls around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.

An athlete, after all, is one of the few things Esther isn’t. A few of the things she is: a standout in Advanced Placement Latin and honors philosophy/literature who can expound on the beauty of the subjunctive mood in Catullus and on Kierkegaard’s existential choices. A writer whose junior thesis for Advanced Placement history won Newton North’s top prize. An actress. President of her church youth group.

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see what a girl can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.

It is also to see these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything. What it comes down to, in this place and time, is that the eternal adolescent search for self is going on at the same time as the quest for the perfect résumé.