It’s been a great few weeks since the book’s May 27 launch. We’ve been in Parenting, Slate, National Review’s website, on the Today Show, Fox & Friends, in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today and so forth. Please come visit the blog and learn more!

THE PRINCESS PROBLEM

Austere times bring austere fashions to the runways but not, it seems, to toy stores. Hunting for birthday presents lately, I’ve waded through sequined princess costumes at FAO Schwartz, the opulent Princess Barbie section of Toys R Us, and sparkly shelves of Disney Princess gear at its retailers.

Yes, princesses are everywhere, and they seem to be recession proof. Disney racked up $4 billion last year marketing the heroines of films from Snow White to Aladdin to preschoolers, and is expanding the franchise with its first black princess, Tiana, star of The Princess and the Frog, later this year.

I suppose Tiana’s debut is worth celebrating, but still, the princess phenomenon has been bothering me as I read business headlines these days. Though Disney’s line-up includes warriors such as Mulan, I can never find her merchandise amid the more traditional princesses such as Cinderella. When my son ran out of diapers at preschool the other day, he was sent home in a pair of pink Cinderella Pull-Ups, and indeed, hers is the archetypal princess narrative: be charming and patient enough, and the right man will rescue you from your labors.

Given recent shifts in the economy, this is an unfortunate message to be sending to girls. Not for political reasons. For practical ones. By some calculations, women may surpass men as a proportion of payroll employment this year. A growing proportion of young women entering the workforce will need to support their whole families at some point. Yet there’s evidence that young women don’t think about this as they plan their careers – because hey, someday that prince might come.

The “He-cession”

Much has been written about the gendered nature of this downturn; cumulatively, men have held three-quarters of jobs lost. Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, calculates that the percentage of working wives with unemployed husbands rose from 2.4 to 5.4 percent from 2007 to 2009, and another 15.6 percent (up from 12.1 percent) have husbands who are out of the labor force. By contrast, the percentage of men whose wives have opted out barely budged.

Some pundits have cheered these changing roles, but many moms don’t feel empowered. Market research firm SheSpeaks surveyed female breadwinners and found that 47% feel stressed about the economy, vs. 34% of homemakers. “I don’t think a lot of them intended to be breadwinners,” says SheSpeaks CEO Aliza Freud. In two-income couples, the mom tends to work fewer hours and provides about a third of family income. Families are more likely to get health insurance through the husband’s job. One woman now supporting her family told Freud’s surveyor that “she feels like she’s bringing home croutons,” not bread.

There are many reasons women earn less than men. Discrimination is one, but expectations matter too. Young men are four times more likely to negotiate their first salary than young women, according to Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s 2003 book Women Don’t Ask, resulting in $500,000 more in earnings by age 60. Sure, it’s tough to ask for things, but as Claire Shipman and Katty Kay’s bestseller Womenomics documents, professional women increasingly negotiate for flexibility and part-time positions. Money appears to be the exception. Since women will do things for their children that they’d never do for themselves, the likely explanation is that young women do not see supporting their future children financially as a crucial part of mothering.

Locus of control

This brings us to the princess problem. Some moms worry that princesses make girls obsessed with beauty. But I think the problem is that the popular princesses lack what psychologists call an “internal locus of control.” This is the belief that you are responsible for making your way in the world. The Cinderella story, notes Laschever, is that “Prince Charming is going to save you.” Best to marry a high-earning man, because your husband will determine the standard of living for you and your children. Indeed, if you do well, you won’t deal with this at all. In the non-Disney Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off their heels and toes to fit into the glass slipper because, as their mother points out, when you marry a prince, you don’t have to walk (i.e. work). While the majority of married women these days expect to contribute, financially, to their families, the key word is “contribute.” That is, provide extras that can be trimmed if we need work-life balance. Newly minted breadwinner moms feel stressed because suddenly it’s not about vacations or violin lessons. Their children’s standard of living is up to them.

Few grow up thinking this way. Laschever notes that in one study of negotiations, 85% of men had an internal locus of control. They determined their worth, and said it was their responsibility to ensure their companies paid up. Only 17% of women felt that way. More than 80% of women felt that their worth was determined by what their companies chose to pay them, just as Cinderella is chosen by her prince.

Perhaps this is changing. Women are pouring into professional schools, and Boushey reports they’re more likely to take out loans – a bet on later earnings. But in this economy, Cinderella Pull-Ups aren’t helping matters. As Laschever says, “the noise of the culture is very loud” – as loud as a 3-year-old in a toy store.

Laura Vanderkam, author of the forthcoming 168 Hours (Portfolio, 2010), is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors

“Promise Keepers”: My review of Max Anderson and Peter Escher’s The MBA Oath, ran at City Journal’s website on Friday. My take: this is a very thoughtful book, though I’m a bit skeptical of the narrative of MBA students saving the world (or that business is much in need of redemption).

“Miracle on West 4th Street”: My essay inaugurates a new series of bar stories at a website called Drinking Diaries. Why do I have fond memories of a bar called Boxers? Maybe because I met my husband there — pretty randomly, given that Boxers was my second stop of the night!

My thesis is that they do, but not for the reasons you may think. The big problem is that SNAP clients tend to do the bulk of their shopping once per month, then struggle to ration the food over 30 days (especially since the benefits are not terribly princely). By the end of the month people are out of food and money, which leads to a starve-then-binge cycle. Anyone reading supermarket tabloids knows this packs pounds onto the celebrities who try it, before you even get to the question of whether people are eating nutritious food or junk.

To be sure, not everyone shops this way (I interviewed a woman who bought seeds with food stamps in order to plant a garden). But on the margins, this cycle contributes to obesity, which suggests a simple solution: pay out food stamp benefits twice a month, rather than once.

Judging by the 130 comments, I’m not sure many people agreed with me, but it’s certainly a topic that inspires strong feelings either way!

Yep, Parents Are Spending More Time With Their Kids: some new research documents that college-educated men and women are spending lots more time with their children than they did a few decades ago. Yet we keep telling this story that people are so starved for time that children are suffering. I think we should be celebrating the good news that this is not the case (or if it is the case, it was never better in some mythical Ozzie and Harriet time).

Research/Publicity Assistant Job Post: I’m hiring! And hoping to get this new person started in next week or two.

The Case Against InBox Zero: Dealing with all your emails can give you a dangerous sense of false accomplishment. Email is not your work. It is a tool to do your work. At your retirement dinner, no one is going to talk about your great email filing system. They’ll want to talk about what you’ve done.

Dr. Phil and Free Time: Dr. Phil recently did a show on new research claiming moms have 30-plus hours of free time per week. Many of the women on his show howled that they didn’t even have time to breathe…yet somehow they managed to find time to get into that studio audience. Hmm…

Adventures in School Lunch: School lunch saves parents time and money, and it’s not necessarily as unhealthy as people think. Could that packed lunch measure up to the government’s nutritional standards?

Real Simple and the Myth of the Time Crunch: One of my favorite magazines, Real Simple, devotes the entire April issue to the issue of time. But are we really as starved for time as the pages claim?

The Femivore’s Dilemma: What’s up with the sudden interest in raising chickens? Just remember: you’ll make more progress saving the world in your 168 hours by, say, running a utility than you will with your garden.

How Much Time Do You Spend Washing Dishes? I’ll bet big bucks that it’s less than you think, and that has ramifications for the whole discipline of figuring out how people spend their time.

The Core Competency Dad: The Economist has new figures showing that men are increasingly chucking their “housework” for spending time with their kids.