Goodbye Hannah Montana: Hello Miley Cyrus

Hannah Montana was every parent’s dream; she went to school, got good grades, had fun and funny friends that were positive, followed all of the rules, and had a great relationship with her parents! Overnight, the show’s lead character, Hannah Montana, became the voice of parents who were hungry for a positive role model on television for their kids to look up to. Young kids found in Hannah Montana someone who made being the nerd and the good kid kind of cool and fun, and they also found that they could have a wonderful relationship with their parents. The parents made a mistake, Hannah Montana was not a lifestyle that is something lazy parents turned her into, because it gave them someone to blame when their children did something wrong! Parents should think about what a major influence they are on the children rather than letting the kids look up to celebrities. Over time, this Disney image of the perfect teenager would be shattered by the very same actress that played her on the show, Miley Cyrus! 



At the 2013 MTV VMAs, Miley Cyrus’ performance left many parents of Hannah Montana fans dismayed, angry, and disappointed! In the onslaught of media coverage of her performance on the VMAs, I find myself asking this question: Why do we care so much about this pop artist’s performance? Before we point the finger at Miley Cyrus, we should point the finger at ourselves.  Our society in general has honed the fine art of creating and feeding beasts like Miley Cyrus, Madonna, and Lady GaGa. We do this through our willingness to watch them for hours on end on whatever media that is out there for us to use. Once we have had our fill of the current spectacle, we get tired of the beast that we have created. Then after a while, a new shocking act comes along that captures our attention, and the cycle repeats itself! The author of Ecclesiastic captured this best when he wrote: “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun”. This observation is true, for Miley Cyrus is not the first young woman to do a sexually charged performance on the VMAs (that award goes to Madonna and her performance of “Like a Virgin”), and she won’t be the last either! I think as a society we need to ask ourselves whether we are angry with her performance, which was the same caliber as Lady GaGa, or are punishing her, because parents feel that their children have lost their role model that first showed them how teens were supposed to act. Perhaps we also expected her to show them how a young woman with fame and fortune should act in public. 


 If parents are angry with Miley Cyrus for any of these reasons, then let me be the first to say

shame on them! First of all a child should have the following three as their role models: 1) God, 2) Mother, and 3) Father and in that order. Parents who want mentors for their children, they should pick people who share their beliefs and outlooks on life and not celebrities. For when parents pick celebrities to be their children’s role models, they run the risk of the celebrities slipping up. As they tend to do so often, this will in the end leave you the parent with a heartbroken child. Bottom-line when it comes to shaping their child’s perception of how they should act as adults or how the real world is, they the parents have the most influence in that arena, and not Miley Cyrus. In essence, I think that we need to let Miley Cyrus live her life. Remember she is a young woman still trying to find herself in the world. So give her the room she needs to make mistakes and learn from them. Who knows maybe ten or twenty years from now she might look back and say: “Damn, did I really do that” , “No wonder everyone was so mad at me”, or maybe she will be proud of her performance! For all of those parents out there who are mad at how she made the transition from childhood star to adult actress/singer...I hear ya. Yes, I think that this could have been done in a better way without drawing so much attention to sex, but that is the world we live in today. I hope that in the future Miley Cyrus learns to market herself as an intelligent, graceful woman who is not ashamed of her sexuality and charm, but at the same does not demean herself for the mere amusement of a hungry a crowd or investors!

- Reported by Nadia Johnson

W.O.W Radio Blogger

September 13, 2013

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