ETCETERIST: Elizabeth, you and Jamie Tisch, mothers of tween girls growing up in Los Angeles, spent nearly two years researching Fashionology LA, launching an amazing website and opening a store in Los Angeles that is, as the Los Angeles Times described it, like “Build-a-Bear Workshop meets ‘Project Runway.’” As you launched this year, Barack Obama was elected president and these two delightful tween girls, Malia and Sasha, moved into the White House. How has this impacted your parenting and parenting across the country?

ELIZABETH WIATT: I hesitate to answer because all this attention on Malia and Sasha puts a lot of pressure on a ten-year-old and a seven-year-old. But it really is great for parents to have such fantastic “real” girls — by which I mean they are not entertainers, like Hannah Montana — to focus on, and, it is important to add, with two really smart and committed parents. [As President Obama’s speech Tuesday night attested, speaking as both a parent and the president, he emphasized how no government agency can replace a parent’s responsibility that "begins at home."] This committed, functional family unit is something we haven’t seen in a very long while in real life.

ETC: So your daughters are now making their beds?

ELIZABETH: They were already making their own beds, but, yes, here are two girls, two role models, parents now can refer to. My daughters, ages nine and seven, are absolutely focused on them. For instance, I couldn’t get them to wear anything as proper as those pretty J. Crew wool coats the Obama girls wore to the Inauguration. But there we were, watching together as a family [with husband Jim Wiatt, CEO of the William Morris Agency], and they said, “Why can’t we dress like that?” and it brought tears to my eyes. Finally, they are willing to get out of their hoodies!

ETC: What about the puppy problem? I understand there isn’t a family in America with tween-age kids that isn’t confronting whether to get a puppy like the Obamas will.

ELIZABETH: (Laughing) Yes, a definite drawback, it has caused the puppy discussion in our household to come back with full force. We had hoped to hold off at least another year! But seriously, it really is great for me as a parent to be able, for instance, to point to the example of Malia and Sasha sitting with such poise and so seemingly undistracted as they were at the Inauguration. Now, when we go to church, I can say, "Stop fidgeting. Think of Malia and Sasha.” And it works.

ETC: When we say "tweens," what age do we actually mean?

ELIZABETH: Six to eleven.

ETC: What are the challenges that face parents and tweens these days, whether you are growing up in the White House, on a farm in Iowa or in Beverly Hills?

ELIZABETH: As a mother, I see tweens wrestling with pretty mature messages coming from all sorts of media about the way they should look and what they should wear.

ETC: What is the parents’ job then? To censor the media? I would imagine the Obamas certainly view that as part of their job.

ELIZABETH: I think one of my jobs as a parent is to slow down the hurry to be “grown up” while also allowing my girls to express their creative choices.