I admit, I love a bunch of YA shows like Pretty Little Liars, Switched at Birth, The Lying Game etc. And I've been seeing ads for all the new Fall shows coming on. It occurred to me that almost all of the female leads in just about all of these shows have a butt-load of money. Ok, they're parents do, but it amounts to the same thing.

They wear expensive clothes, have their own cars at 16, naturally have cell phones and laptops. That goes without saying. But the clothes! And the accessories! Unless they're using really good knock-offs, some of these teens are sporting bags that cost more than I earn in a month!

It's pretty sad when a woman in her 30s is watching a show about a 16 year-old and envying her enormous walk-in closet full of designer clothes, shoes and accessories that's bigger than my bathroom. Yeah, ok, it's fiction, I get it, but still. The people writing these books that the shows are based off of, the people buying and reading these books, and the execs deciding to buy the rights to these books and make them into shows obviously think this is a reasonable portrayal.

And on one show, a parent was cavalierly going to write his son a check for up to $1,000 for settling a poker debt! Again! Even though he was perturbed that this was a recurring problem, he was still quick to pull out the checkbook and offer up the money. When he started quoting figures up around three grand then he got really angry. And, same show, the parents called in the two daughters sick to school to go out shopping for cars for their 16th birthday. Yeah, because they don't sell cars on weekends.

But even the shows that try and come off as more mainstream, I just keep looking at the way these girls dress and they are almost always in dresses or skirts and humongous heels and super decked out. When I was in high school - which wasn't all that long ago - if you got dolled up like that you were trying too hard to impress someone. What happened to jeans and hoodies? Apparently, none of these families have heard of Old Navy.

And they can all go out any time of the day and night. Yeah, I know, it would screw up the plot line otherwise. I guess part of me is jealous. I want to go back to being 16 with a new sports car, a wardrobe that cost more than the yearly income of Average American Worker, and is so vast I almost never have to wear the same thing twice. I want to wear Mac and other designer make-up when I'm still a kid instead of Cover Girl and Maybelline and whatever's on sale at CVS. I want designer shoes and boots to coordinate with each and every outfit, with matching purses. None of this one purse in the Fall for Back to School and you use it until it wear out crap. Oh wait! I still do that.