Public Service Pam

Every girl under the age of 25 should have been watching Dancing With the Stars the last couple of nights. Every dad in America should have been watching as well. In an "All Star" reprise season of the show, Pamela Andersen was among the celebrities invited to make an encore appearance on the show. Her appearance really served as a public service announcement for every young woman in America.

What I know about Pamela Andersen has come from copies of People magazine left laying around the office and hearing other peoples comments about her, her celebrity marriages, and her criminally augmented boobs. So, I'll go out on a limb here with my observation but feel fairly safe at this height: Pamela Andersen is a poster child for a failure of parenting. For an absence of self-esteem. For what becomes of a person who chooses a life lived in pursuit of fame and esteem by association. A life that lives or dies by the arm you hang on.

When a child, any child, regardless of gender, is raised without a well formed sense of self then they accumulate nothing in the drawer marked "self-worth." They become puppets and dolls, errand boys and accessories, in the lives of others-- and almost always others who share a similar disease. They are condemned to a life trying to gain approval, constantly at the bidding of others. (As a friend of mine in the ER likes to say, when your daughter grows up to be a pole dancer you know you've pretty much flunked fatherhood.)

I felt there was a desperate sadness to Pamela Anderson last night as she failed her dance routine and became the first to get booted off the show. It was a "Sunset Boulevard" moment. It just seemed that, there she was, not flunking at dance but at the only thing she knew how to do: be popular.

Flunking popularity on a primetime national TV stage has got to be a miserable feeling. For someone with her credentials, a monumental personal failure, a zero balance in the self-worth vault. And that's why father's and daughters should have been watching. This is a woman who seems to have started out in self-esteem bankruptcy, created a fortune-- a self-worth Ponzi scheme, if you will-- only to get caught on primetime television with nothing. Nothing to provide and nothing to be given.

I have always told my daughter that it doesn't matter what she chooses in life. She just needs to choose wisely enough that, by the time she's 50, she can look in the mirror, know who's looking back, and have the ability to say, "I choose to be here." It's about ownership. And it's a sad thing watching someone discover that, after all these years, they have been a renter, not an owner. Worse still, to find you can no longer come up with the rent.