In the February issue of Harper’s Bazaar, 17-year-old teen superstar Miley Cyrus talks to reporter Amy Larocca about the pressures of fame and being a teen role model.

“My job is to be a role model, and that’s what I want to do, but my job isn’t to be a parent,” she says in the article. “My job isn’t to tell your kids how to act or how not to act, because I’m still figuring that out for myself.”

Cyrus brings up a good point about our celebrity-driven pop culture: who is actually responsible for celebrity role models?

Parents love to give their kids unlimited access to squeaky-clean tween celebs like Cyrus. And Americans’ passion for gossip magazines and TMZ-like websites are only to happy to deliver up the latest dish. (And even Christian publications; Cyrus and her father Billy Ray appeared on the cover of Brio Magazine.)

So when Miley Cyrus goes to church with her family and new boyfriend, parents applaud her good-girl actions and pass photos of the family carrying Bibles around the internet.

When she throws in a pole dancing move during the 2009 Teen Choice Awards, parents scramble to cover their kids’ eyes and lecture them on the dangers of immodesty.

But when you come right down to it, isn’t Miley Cyrus just like every other teen or almost adult?

I mean, which of us would be willing to put our own kids under that same microscope and hope to see different results? Maybe they’re not pole dancing on national television, but chances are as a parent you’ve dealt with your kids’ tattoos, piercings, embarrassing photos on Facebook, or bad dating choices.

On the other hand, Cyrus’ life has become a $1 billion industry. And with that does come responsibility. You want our cash, you do have to jump through some of our hoops.

It’s a fair trade off, isn’t it? We offered Miley Cyrus a pedestal and she gladly got on it. That’s the way American pop culture works. So if she has complaints about being criticized by the public for her less than Disney-esque but mostly normal teen behavior, she needs to remember that she can bow out of the public eye at any time.

But if we’re bothered that our celebrity role model du jour has let us down, we need to consider that we have ourselves to blame for helping to put her there in the first place.

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