"Hannah Montana Tix Moms": Bad Role Models

NEW YORK, Jan. 2, 2008

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(CBS) Parents want to give their children the best of everything, from the coolest gadgets to the hottest concert tickets.

But some parents go too far, experts point out, and end up teaching very wrong lessons.

Parents such as Priscilla Ceballos -- the Texas woman who tried to win tickets for her six-year-old daughter for a concert by Miley Cyrus, better-known as Hannah Montana, by having the girl lie in an essay-writing contest and claim help her father had died in Iraq.

Ceballos later admitted to a local TV station, "We never said anything like this was a true story, never. It was just an essay."

It was hardly the first time mothers had gone to extremes for their kids.

In 2006, 16-year-old Megan Meier committed suicide. Later, her parents found out she had been tormented on MySpace.com by someone she thought was a boy named Josh Evans, but who was actually the mother of a friend Megan had been feuding with.

"She knew our daughter struggled with depression," Megan's father, Ron, said later, "and was on medication since she was in third grade."

But perhaps the most memorable meddling mother was Wanda Holloway, the Texas woman who tried to help her daughter make the cheerleading squad by hiring a hit-man to kill the mother of a rival cheerleader.

Said prosecutor Alice Brown at the time, "I think it's the act of a person who is used to getting what she wanted, and when she was frustrated, was willing to go a little farther than most of us might go."

On The Early Show Wednesday, psychotherapist Dr. Leslie Austin, Ph.D. told co-anchor Harry Smith, "I don't think these moms are bad people, but they're really modeling the wrong values for their kids. And what they're broadcasting is, 'I want what I want, I want it now, I'll do anything I can to get it.' That's what they're telling their kids, including, 'Lie, cheat, and steal,' which is not OK."

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