What was dad doing during Miley's photo shoot?

Fortunately, my children have aged beyond the Miley Cyrus mania. It's a good thing, too, considering what some mothers and fathers are doing these days just to procure tickets to her concert.

For what? Another 15-year-old, here today, gone tomorrow sensation?

Except that Miley's star seems to have risen faster than even Britney Spears' or Lindsay Lohan's. She's made the leap from Disney Channel's "Hannah Montana" to posing for revealing photos to be published in June's issue of Vanity Fair. According to a USA Today report, one waist-up shot shows Miley looking provocatively over her right shoulder, her back nude and breasts covered by her arms and shimmery fabric.

She's 15 years old.

Disney Channel, not surprisingly, is crying foul. "Unfortunately, as the article suggests, a situation was created to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines," Disney Channel officials said in a statement.

And Miley herself, who earlier had defended the Annie Leibovitz photos as "artsy," now says since she's seen the article and the photographs that she feels "so embarrassed."

"I never intended for any of this to happen, and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about," she said in a statement released by her publicist.

OK, as the mother of tweeners/teenagers, I can see how a child could get herself in such a pickle. It takes a long time for the developing brain to connect the dots between actions and consequences. It may take even longer for young starlets who tend to be protected from "consequences" by agents, publicists and others who tend to work for celebrities.

More inexplicable is Vanity Fair's version of events, which says Miley's parents and/or minders were on the Vanity Fair set all day during the photo shoot. "Since the photo was taken digitally, they saw it on the shoot and everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait of Miley," said a statement from Vanity Fair spokeswoman Beth Kseniak.

This certainly puts a new spin on this matter, doesn't it? It's a bit of a stretch for Disney Channel to claim Miley was somehow manipulated when her own parents and handlers were with her the entire time. Why didn't mom or dad set some boundaries?

Perhaps it's just too difficult, under the circumstances, to question Leibovitz's artistic judgment.