Secret Keeper Girl

Massachusetts Moms & Daughters Will Be First To See The Show & Meet Dannah!

More than kudos go out to the two moms and daughters who are road-tripping it from Massachusetts to State College, PA for the debut of the all-new Secret Keeper Girl stage show. We just mailed back-stage passes to them for the valiant effort of attending from out-of-state. The four of them will meet Dannah at a special Sweet Treat Reception prior to show time as Secret Keeper Girl Live: The Pajama Party Tour debuts August 17, introducing a new partnership with the beloved VeggieTales brand.

Created as a relationship-building event for moms and their tween daughters (typically ages 8-12), the all-new pajama party-themed two and a half hour event features DRAMATIZED stories about meaningful friendships, FUN fashion shows that demonstrate modesty, INCREDIBLE balloon sculptures, BOUNCING beach ball competitions, MOTHER/DAUGHTER conversation time & COLORFUL confetti cannons.   A handful of moms are featured with their own hilarious fashion show in the new “Totally Tubular TV Mom’s Show,” a look at the fashion of some of TV’s favorite moms—and a great chance to talk about peer pressure! Five special girls from the area have been pre-selected as models for the tour’s hallmark, a seasonal tween fashion show featuring Gresh’s Truth or Bare Modesty Tests.  Everything is designed to encourage discussions about modesty, peer pressure and true inner beauty. (Moms and daughters will even be treated to some photos of celebs without make-up to prove just how fake the beauty on the cover of a magazine can be!)

 A special feature of the new show is a partnership with VeggieTales. Bob and Larry, the tomato and cucumber made famous for their silly videos with great messages, are introducing a new character to their family in August, SweetPea. SweetPea Beauty’s goal is to teach little girls that inner beauty counts more than what’s celebrated on the fallacious covers of beauty magazines. Dannah was more than happy to partner with them when they approached her this spring during a Secret Keeper Girl event in their home city of Nashville. “I’m so happy that someone with the branding muscle of VeggieTales is concerned enough to speak into a very critical cultural issues for our little girls. And they do it with fun and humor, so it’s easy to digest!”

Secret Keeper Girl Live: The Pajama Party Tour debuts in State College on August 17. The event starts at 6:30 pm with tickets available online at secretkeepergirl.com. The team is keeping tabs on tickets sold from out-of-state in an effort to offer invitations to the Sweet Treat Reception on a first-come first-served basis until space runs out. 

Tickets are $12.00. The show is expected to sell out as it has in past years in our hometown. For more information, please call Eileen at 814-234-6072.

Posted by Dannah Gresh, Creator of Secret Keeper Girl  Are you one of “those” moms who is always the lone boycotter of the newest TV fad? Turns out, you’re a good mom and some new research proves just how much you’re protecting. (It’s more than her mind!) It’s not just the categorically “bad” television that hurts our kids. The most sensational scenarios are not what’s robbing our little girls of their innocence.  It’s the slow-drip of value-ingraining shows where girls dress up and go on dates and our little girls are pressed to identify with older more mature characters and life scenarios. (I probably don’t have to mention that Hannah Montana has a lot of that stuff in it, do I?) It’s what culture as deemed the “norm” that probably shouldn’t be, if you want to keep the little in your girl.

There is an inarguable connection between the media diet of tweens and early sexual activity in teens. Fifty-five percent of teens who were exposed to a lot of sexual material as tweens had sexual intercourse between the ages of 14-16 compared with 6% of teens who rarely saw sexual imagery as tweens.[i] While studies often look at television shows with content deemed appropriate for teens and adults, you have to consider how a steady diet of boyfriend/girlfriend television programs, mildly sexual music lyrics, and an occasional PG or PG-13 movie impacts a girl. Doesn’t it make sense that anything we feed our daughters that says “be boy-crazy” would just put her in the cultural current of early sexualization?

As I was writing Six Ways To Keep The Little In Your Girl: Guiding Your Daughter From Her Tweens To Her Teens (September 1, 2010), one of the more unusual findings of my studies was that there is an actual biological component to this trend. After viewing romantic film content, both men and women being studied experienced changes in progesterone and testosterone levels. (Have you ever watched an over-the-top romantic movie with perhaps mild sexual nuances to it, and then found yourself craving your husband?) These findings indicate that media content actually alters the endocrine environment, at least temporarily. As I write this the pediatric field is exploring this question: can early exposure to sexual images such as those seen in music videos and commonly viewed primetime television be altering the rate of maturity in a girl’s body, thus creating the trend of reaching menarche earlier?

Play it safe, mom. The stakes are too high.

So, is your daughter to be a monk? Naw! TV, music and movies aren’t all bad. Just some of it is. My new release, Six Ways to Keep The Little In Your Girl, is full of more great statistics, hilarious stories of raising my own tweens and creative ideas to guide their eye toward age-appropriate television. Pre-purchase a copy today at our online bookstore.

[i] Victor Strasburger, M.D. “Clueless: Why Do Pediatricians Underestimate the Media’s Influence on Children and Adolescents?” Pediatrics: Official Journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, Volume 117, Number 4, April 2006,