Are pop stars responsible for being family-friendly?

Photo by Karley Steele ‘27

In 2024, Sabrina Carpenter began the majorly successful Short n’ Sweet Tour. She filled 58 arenas in the United States and Europe, and has 12 more concerts planned later this year. Fans of Carpenter’s music know that her recent albums “emails i can’t send” and “Short n’ Sweet,” which made up her setlist, included explicit lyrics and themes. Still, parents unfamiliar with Carpenter were shocked by the songs and performance. Soon after the tour started, many parents who took their children to the tour were upset at the inappropriate and sexual content that was performed. 

The shock regarding Carpenter’s current music points back to her Disney Channel days. While starring on the show “Girl Meets World,” she had a family-friendly music career, and her parents used her clean past to argue that she should still appeal to younger audiences. However, this expectation can be unrealistic, as it expects Carpenter to never mature or explore her identity outside of her Disney star persona.

Society's perception of the innocent child star has plagued public female figures throughout the years, forcing women into a strict standard of girlhood, even if it has been years since a person was in any media directed at children. When a woman rejects the conservative brand that was built up for her, which was created to appeal to a family-friendly audience, fans tend to feel betrayed and impose their judgments upon her. 

One of the first significant examples of this ideology was the constant harassment and bullying that surrounded Britney Spears in the early 2000s. Spears first became popular after starring on the “Mickey Mouse Club” and used her prolific musical talent to release her first album “…Baby One More Time”. However, as she experimented with her music and used more sensual ideas in her music, tabloids quickly changed the narrative on her, claiming she was a bad influence on young girls. A similar pattern was repeated with Miley Cyrus, who left her days on Disney Channel to establish her own independent music career, but was heavily scrutinized by the public for her mature music and public use of substances. 

The ongoing discourse about the maturity of female pop singers’ music and concerts reflects the high standards in the public eye that women are expected to conform to. Often, women are forced to be role models for young girls, whether they want that responsibility or not. Men are usually not held to the same standard as women in public media, even though their music may contain similar adult themes. Public scrutiny for women growing up is a reflection of the culture of purity that claims that women who express themselves sexually are less morally just than women who do not. Those who lean towards traditional ideals tend to use sexuality to shame women through a lens of moral superiority and condemnation that she is not following societal expectations of how she should act and behave. 

While many blame Carpenter and other pop stars for exposing children to sexual themes, it is ultimately the responsibility of parents to monitor the media their children consume and decide whether the content is acceptable. “Short n’ Sweet” included a Parental Advisory warning with its release, with seven of its twelve songs on the album classified as explicit. Carpenter had not advertised her Short n’ Sweet Tour to children nor as a family-friendly event, hence it is not her responsibility that parents had not informed themselves of what Carpenter’s tour would entail before deciding to take their children to her concerts.

The definition of what is considered family-friendly differs from each person, and expecting a celebrity to curate an image that fits perfectly with every audience member’s ideals is unrealistic. Rather than trying to force female pop stars to abide by standards of innocence that are acceptable to families, parents should discern what material they want their children to be able to interact with.