Lizzie MaGuire

Lizzie MaGuire Season One: Aaron Carter's in Town

           Lizzie Maguire was a popular television show that aired on the Disney Channel in early 2001, a show that centered on the life of Lizzie a young girl getting through middle school along with an animated sarcastic alter ego. The series stars Hilary Duff as Lizzie an ordinary, ‘girl next door’ preteen who is confronted by issue adolescents face in their daily life along.  In this particular episode, the famous teen pop star Aaron Carter is in town shooting a Christmas music video. Lizzie offers to write a piece about the music video for the school paper and shows up at the studio harassing the staff to meet the one and only Aaron but lets her best friend take her place to meet the pop star. Leaving her tape recorder in Aaron’s dressing room, she is confronted by Aaron and shares a kiss under the mistletoe outside his door and she and her friends end up being featured in the music video.

                        Another example of this theme becoming more and more normalized in television and books targeted to tweens, the idea of fame has become an important part of the tween life. While it’s perfectly acceptable for children to look up too and aspire to be like their favorite characters on television, the celebrity lifestyle seems so normal to our kids today. In shows like Lizzie Maguire that would be categorized as contemporary realistic fiction, the show features a very realistic lifestyle, making experiences and situations very relatable for the viewers. However with the fame and celebrity lives becoming more and more a part of the story or show, what is this setting our kids up for, aspirations or rejection by standards that television portrays? Is it healthy for our children to be surrounded by the celebrity lifestyle.