When did negative role models become my only option for talking about life with my teens?

That's the question that plagued me after watching back-to-back evenings of teen dramas "Gossip Girl" and "90210". And I'm actually a fan of the genre, since I've often used teen soaps' over-the-top plots as a great way to have non-loaded discussions with my teens about touchy subjects like sex, drugs, and alcohol.

But after three hours of viewing, all I had to work with was a bunch of shallow, alcoholic, label-obsessed characters whose entire beings seem to be devoted to consuming.

So parents, here's the deal: We can let our kids make sense of this stuff on their own, or we can shoe-horn our way in so we can infuse their entertainment with our value systems. We can point out that, in real life, kids actually think long and hard about losing their virginity, rather than making such a monumental decision in the equivalent of one episode. We can observe that acting out carries huge consequences, that there are ways to have fun without going to a bar and getting hammered, and that kids don't have to wear designer clothes, be anorexic, or have six-pack abs to be attractive. We can discuss how every character is a caricature and that in real life almost nothing is so black and white. We can hold up our own mirrors to these dumbed-down, juiced-up versions of teen life and really help our kids think about what would happen if they spent that much, drank that much, or had that much(seemingly unprotected) sex with married women or random classmates.

Are our kids seeing what we see? Here are some questions you can ask your kids about these shows:

• Do you see your life in these shows?

• How about the characters? Are they like kids you know? If so, how? If not, why not?

• Do you believe the characters are really in high school?

• When you see someone acting out, drinking, drugging, or hooking up in one of these shows, does it make the behavior seem silly or normal?

• How about all the "things" and clothes in these shows? Does seeing them make you want them?

• Do you learn anything by watching what happens to these characters, or is it all mindless entertainment and guilty pleasure?

• What do you think is creeping in, message-wise?