Dora the Role Model's Big Birthday Adventure

Dora builds confidence in children because she shows them how to deal with different situations, and she gives them a chance to respond as if they were in the same room with her,” said Ted Lempert, president of Children Now, a research and advocacy group that focuses on children and the media.

“There really was a need for a character of color in children’s programming,” Mr. Lempert said. Dora is the first Latina character to have the leading role on a children’s series. The show has been commercial television’s top-rated preschool program for most of the decade....

In recent months, as the country’s immigration debate has intensified, a bruised and bloody mug shot of Dora began circulating on the Internet. Her face featured a black eye, and blood dripping from her nose and lip. Underneath her image, a sign reads: “Illegal Border Crossing” then “Resisting Arrest.”...

Dora is not identified as being from a specific country, but as a character who could be from anywhere.

“And that means no one is excluded culturally,” said Ms. Masi de Casanova, so Nickelodeon can market Dora dolls, games, bed linens and children’s clothing to a wide range of consumers. Sales of Dora merchandise have totaled $11 billion since being introduced in 2002, according to Nickelodeon.

-‘Dora’ Special Explores Influence on Children

Role Models for Muslim Children -THE 99 comic series

THE 99

The Hacker Role Model

New Yorker profile of WikiLeaks Julian Assange;

Assange was born in 1971, in the city of Townsville, on Australia’s northeastern coast, but it is probably more accurate to say that he was born into a blur of domestic locomotion. Shortly after his first birthday, his mother—I will call her Claire—married a theatre director, and the two collaborated on small productions. They moved often, living near Byron Bay, a beachfront community in New South Wales, and on Magnetic Island, a tiny pile of rock that Captain Cook believed had magnetic properties that distorted his compass readings. They were tough-minded nonconformists. (At seventeen, Claire had burned her schoolbooks and left home on a motorcycle.) Their house on Magnetic Island burned to the ground, and rifle cartridges that Claire had kept for shooting snakes exploded like fireworks. “Most of this period of my childhood was pretty Tom Sawyer,” Assange told me. “I had my own horse. I built my own raft. I went fishing. I was going down mine shafts and tunnels.”

Assange’s mother believed that formal education would inculcate an unhealthy respect for authority in her children and dampen their will to learn. “I didn’t want their spirits broken,” she told me. In any event, the family had moved thirty-seven times by the time Assange was fourteen, making consistent education impossible. He was homeschooled, sometimes, and he took correspondence classes and studied informally with university professors. But mostly he read on his own, voraciously. He was drawn to science. “I spent a lot of time in libraries going from one thing to another, looking closely at the books I found in citations, and followed that trail,” he recalled. He absorbed a large vocabulary, but only later did he learn how to pronounce all the words that he learned...

While on the run, Claire rented a house across the street from an electronics shop. Assange would go there to write programs on a Commodore 64, until Claire bought it for him, moving to a cheaper place to raise the money. He was soon able to crack into well-known programs, where he found hidden messages left by their creators. “The austerity of one’s interaction with a computer is something that appealed to me,” he said. “It is like chess—chess is very austere, in that you don’t have many rules, there is no randomness, and the problem is very hard.” Assange embraced life as an outsider. He later wrote of himself and a teen-age friend, “We were bright sensitive kids who didn’t fit into the dominant subculture and fiercely castigated those who did as irredeemable boneheads.”

When Assange turned sixteen, he got a modem, and his computer was transformed into a portal. Web sites did not exist yet—this was 1987—but computer networks and telecom systems were sufficiently linked to form a hidden electronic landscape that teen-agers with the requisite technical savvy could traverse. Assange called himself Mendax—from Horace’s splendide mendax, or “nobly untruthful”—and he established a reputation as a sophisticated programmer who could break into the most secure networks. He joined with two hackers to form a group that became known as the International Subversives, and they broke into computer systems in Europe and North America, including networks belonging to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In a book called “Underground,” which he collaborated on with a writer named Suelette Dreyfus, he outlined the hacker subculture’s early Golden Rules: “Don’t damage computer systems you break into (including crashing them); don’t change the information in those systems (except for altering logs to cover your tracks); and share information.”

Finding the right role models for your children

Ms. Cyrus’s appeal among those age 13 to 17 has dropped, too, according to E-Poll Market Research, a brand and celebrity research firm. Of those surveyed online recently, only 24 percent said they liked or liked her a lot, compared with 45 percent in 2008. Those who track preteens are noticing the shift. Tina Wells, a market research executive who consults with Fortune 500 companies, said Ms. Cyrus ranked No. 7 in April on its list of celebrities considered cool by children 8 to 12 years old. Two years ago she was No. 1....

It is tricky for any teenage star to navigate the path to adulthood. (Britney Spears? Lindsay Lohan?) But Ms. Cyrus, it seems, is alienating her fans faster than she is gaining new ones. Partly to blame is last year’s pole dance at the Teen Choice Awards, and the recent video posted on TMZ of her giving a lap dance to a 44-year-old film director.

For some mothers of Ms. Cyrus’s fans, her wrenching transition from teen idol to sexual icon has become a teachable moment.

“I’m just impressed with kids picking up on the change and saying it’s not that interesting and they don’t relate,” said Megan Calhoun of Ross, Calif., the founder of TwitterMoms, a blog for mothers that has 26,000 members. Some have expressed dismay at the shift in Ms. Cyrus’s persona. “It’s almost as if these young stars don’t realize it is a turnoff,” Ms. Calhoun said.

Some parents chalk up her behavior to teenage angst. “It doesn’t surprise me what she is going through,” said Wendy Ellis, a mother of two from Odenton, Md. “The raging hormones. She is testing the limits of the box and what is appropriate.”

-Fans of Miley Cyrus Question Her New Path

Related: Where morals and science collide