The younger sister, Anna, is so lonely and has such a deep attachment disorder that she accepts a proposal of marriage from a guy she doesn't know, with no last name, two hours after she meets him.

So I'm watching “Frozen,” again, just the good parts, on YouTube, with my three small rabid Elsa and Anna fans. And it occurs to me: Why is no one talking about the abject parenting failure inflicted upon these girls (the movie’s, not mine)? One of them, Elsa, is so repressed, she buries her kingdom in ice and snow and runs off to a palace that must have been paid for with the royalties off that infernal song.

I blame the girls’ parents, who react to having, shall we say, an atypically developing child by hiding her away from everyone, including her own little sister, who adores her. I shudder at this, with its echoes of an unenlightened past (which only ended in the 1980s), when parents were urged to institutionalize and write off the potential of some children, such as those born with Down syndrome. This was especially so if the child had been a danger to other family members, as Elsa was when she accidentally froze her sister’s brain. While I hasten to add that I am not equating Elsa's ability to shoot ice from her fingertips with the unique challenges of real children, Elsa’s parents respond to her in a way that reminds me of those bad old days.

And really, think about it. "Conceal, don't feel?" We have a generation of kindergarteners singing those words at the tops of their cute little lungs. What message does it send? To say nothing of the lyric, “Be the good girl you always have to be.” Is that line not particularly chilling for those of us who grew up with very real versions of this imperative? There are plenty of historic precedents for this expectation, beginning with Eve and continuing right up to the irksome culture of Disney princesses.

Remember Cinderella? “Through it all, Cinderella remained ever gentle and kind.” Maybe if she’d been a little rebellious and asserted herself, maybe if she’s gotten angry, she wouldn’t have ended up in rags, crying beside a fountain. Almost everyone chafes at parental expectations sometime. A little rebellion in a five-year-old is harmless compared with the belated self-expression of a grownup who should have, but never did, express herself decades ago. Ice mountains in a ballroom, as Elsa’s child self creates even at the risk of displeasing her parents, are nothing compared with the kingdom-wide deep freeze she unleashes as a long-repressed young woman.

We now know that children do best when encouraged, in a loving environment, to become whoever they want to become. What if Elsa’s parents had done that? What if, instead of hiding her ability, the late King and Queen of Arendelle had accepted and nurtured their eldest daughter’s surprising gift and helped her put it to good use? There would be no lost youth, no burden of being different. Elsa might embrace her fate as a queen. With magic powers. Maybe Washington would hire her to send global warming naysayers into a deep freeze.