Yet, when I finally got pregnant myself, I was terrified at the thought of having a daughter. Here is my dirty little secret: as a journalist, I have spent nearly two decades writing about girls, thinking about girls, talking about how girls should be raised.

So little girls may be drawn to pink, sparkly princess gowns as a way of asserting that they're definitely girls. Orenstein says very young children don't yet understand that your sex is fixed - that you can't go to sleep a girl and wake up a boy. That obsession with everything pink and princess is the focus of Orenstein's new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. 'The dentist asked, 'Would you like to get in my princess chair so I can sparkle your teeth?' And I just thought, 'Oh my gosh, do you have a princess drill, too?'' The final straw came at Daisy's first dentist appointment. 'The waitress at our breakfast joint would hand her her pancakes and say, 'Here's your princess pancakes,'' Orenstein says. Suddenly, Orenstein began noticing princess references everywhere, surrounding her daughter. 'She came home having memorized, as if by osmosis, all the names and gown colors of the Disney princesses,' Orenstein tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer. From premature sexualization to the risk of depression to rising rates of narcissism, the potential negative impact of this new girlie-girl culture is undeniable-yet armed with awareness and recognition, parents can effectively counterbalance its influence in their daughters' lives.A few years ago, author Peggy Orenstein sent her daughter Daisy off to preschool - and within a week, she noticed a profound change. The stakes turn out to be higher than she ever imagined. or do they?In search of answers, Peggy Orenstein visited Disneyland, trolled American Girl Place, and met parents of beauty-pageant preschoolers tricked out like Vegas showgirls. But how dangerous is pink and pretty, anyway? Being a princess is just make-believe eventually they grow out of it . . . And commercialization has spread the message faster and farther, reaching girls at ever-younger ages. Somewhere between the exhilarating rise of Girl Power in the 1990s and today, the pursuit of physical perfection has been recast as the source of female empowerment.

Sweet and sassy or predatory and hardened, sexualized girlhood influences our daughters from infancy onward, telling them that how a girl looks matters more than who she is. Peggy Orenstein, acclaimed author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers Girls & Sex and Schoolgirls, offers a radical, timely wake-up call for parents, revealing the dark side of a pretty and pink culture confronting girls at every turn as they grow into adults.

Cinderella ate my daughter