The warm fuzzies that bubbled up while reading about the stretching mega-givers starting popping pretty darned fast when this came along soon after the article on benvolence.

Starting out by detailing the latest in fashions for kids ... $88 for a pair of the cutest red shorts, and a pair of jeans going for $106 ... it continues to shock -- well, shock me, anyway -- all the way along.

"I have to have the best-dressed kids in the neighborhood," says Sasha Charnin Morrison, fashion director at Us Weekly magazine, joking that she's gone into "financial ruin" to secure her twin 4-year-old boys' position as such. "If I had girls, I would probably be jailed right now, because I wouldn't be able to pay my bills."

Apparently, she's joking. Ha. Ha.

Family therapist Carleton Kendrick worries that "girls have been sexualized at decidedly younger ages", and is rightfully appalled over reports that in 2003 consumers spent $1.6 million on THONG UNDERWEAR for girls ages 7 to 12!

OMG!

One of his favorite sad stories to tell is of the fashion twins ... similarly dressed in, "halter tops, low-slung, sprayed-on jeans, dangly earrings, belly buttons exposed and very elaborate makeup," a mother (45 to 55) and daughter (maybe 14) combo.

"My initial response was 'How pathetic,' " Kendrick says. "Neither one of them was appropriately dressed."

Yes, the silliness of fashion and its victims is one thing, but the expense is what kills me. What is a child learning when more is spent to dress the little darling for one trip to the mall with Mom than entire families in some parts of the world see in a year?

Perhaps this report answers that question, at least in part.

Welcoming readers to the "... pampered existence of today's children, a place where pester power rules and parents are milked like cash cows", the article asks parents to cast their minds back to the last time they stood their ground, "... as your nine-year-old begged for yet another pair of trainers, or your 14-year-old threatened to fail his exams unless he could go out with his friends midweek – bankrolled by you?

Does this not happen often enough?

It also warns that pampered kids can grow up to be dysfunctional within society, and I'll add on a bit that hazards a guess that they won't be much inclined to give to those less fortunate ... or toward the betterment of the common good. Common, after all, doesn't wear eighty-eight bucks worth of cute little red shorts.

Scary and sad are the words that come to my mind.