My two-year-old twins came back from pre-school last week singing the chorus to Let it Go. For those fortunate enough not to know, Let it Go is the torch song at the heart of Frozen, the Disney princess movie of 2013 and beloved of girls everywhere. My children are played out by the song every week at ballet. Now, thanks to their teacher, they can sing the words too.

And I was taken aback. The TV rules are pretty relaxed in my house. I don’t set quotas (the iPhone is different), nor do I fret about the quality of what they watch, as long as it is roughly age-appropriate. But after they begged me to load the video for Let it Go on YouTube, I found myself having a very un-fun parental reaction.

I’ve seen the film before, on a plane, years ago, but that was before I had kids, and while it struck me as annoying at the time – the nakedness of its drive to be considered uplifting is as grim and depressing as that tone always is – I didn’t think much about its presentation of women. Now, in my living room, I have two avid two-year-olds trying to climb into the television to get nearer to Elsa.

And what on earth is Elsa doing in the Let it Go scene? She’s dancing in the snow, complaining of how hard it is to play by the rules and conceal her inner self. She climbs the mountain. She sets up the ice palace. Then she raises her tiny, heart-shaped face to the heavens and bellows out the climax of the song, a moment of self-actualisation that the animators represent by having her bust her out of her dowdy village clothes and into … an evening gown, with a slit up the side all the way to her thigh and a bridal-like train dragging behind her. Meanwhile, in another universe, the boys are watching dogs in hats rescue puppies on Paw Patrol.

I think banning things often backfires, but in this case I don’t care how much they complain: no one is going to Halloween as Elsa.

Respect my authority

Singing a Disney song would probably get my kids expelled from their new music school, a sort of junior Juilliard that takes itself very seriously. The first class last week reacquainted me with something I hadn’t seen for a long time: a very, very good teacher.

“She’s mean,” whispered my kids’ babysitter, as we sat down on the floor, and went into a fugue state, whisked back to the terrors of some long ago classroom. The teacher, meanwhile, eyed the class like a flight attendant assessing a cabin for potential troublemakers before a long flight. Her eyes fell on one of my daughters, a child I consider to be very talented, but among whose talents I wouldn’t put sitting still very high.

My daughter looked back with an air of “Eh, eh, what’s this?” But everyone felt the teacher’s authority. A mother to my left started hissing, desperately: “Cooper, sit down.” A little girl called Aquarius, taking a finger-puppet from the box before she was supposed to, was dispatched back to her seat with a single look. Whereupon class began, everyone behaved impeccably. It was a total delight.

Larry by numbers

Curb Your Enthusiasm came back for a ninth season last week, after a six-year absence, and it’s a sign of changed times that there were murmurings online about how it mocked the afflicted. The whole point, of course, is Larry David’s insensitivity to the afflicted and these reviews misunderstood who is in on the joke. The bigger problem was the show’s formula poked through a little too starkly – the set-up of finding something you can’t joke about (rape, disability), then having Larry blunder through all the stop signs until everyone hates him – being so luridly on display, it felt a little too much like awkward TV comedy by numbers.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist