Update: The sexed up children of this culture

In The Sexed Up Children Of This Culture I said:

Maybe, because some parents may not know what is age appropriate for their attire, they haven't got a clue about what is appropriate for children. There is nothing sadder than a 40 something, 50 something trying to look like they are twenty. What wasn't sagging when you are 20, is more than likely than not, sagging now.

Kristen Russell Dobson, the managing editor of Parent Map, has a great article in Parent Map. In Are Girls Acting Sexy Too Young? Dobson says:

A 2003 analysis of TV sitcoms found gender harassment in nearly every episode. Most common: jokes about women’s sexuality or women’s bodies, and comments that characterized women as sex objects. And according to the 2007 Report of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, “Massive exposure to media among youth creates the potential for massive exposure to portrayals that sexualize women and girls and teach girls that women are sexual objects.”

Those messages can be harmful to kids because they make sex seem common — even normal — among younger and younger kids. In So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids, co-authors Diane E. Levin, Ph.D., and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D., write that “sex in commercial culture has far more to do with trivializing and objectifying sex than with promoting it, more to do with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that sex as portrayed in the media is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical.”

The result? “Girls are much more sexualized than they have been in the past,” says Amy Lang, a Seattle sexual health educator and the owner of Birds + Bees + Kids. “There is something that has shifted, and I have to wonder if it’s this message they’ve gotten since they were 8, which is that intimacy is less important than how you look.

“They’re dressing in a way that’s more teenager-like. You see a 6- or 8-year-old girl wearing a miniskirt and tights and 1-inch-heel boots. They’re emulating TV shows that they’re watching.”

I suppose there are a group of parents who don't want conflict and give in because “everyone else is doing it.” Remember the everyone else is often the lowest common denominator. Some parents feel they must be their child's BFF. Wrong. You are supposed to be the parent. Some one has to be in charge. Russell provide some excellent resources for managing the media. Find resources for managing media here.

The culture is like cars racing at the Indianapolis 500 careening kids toward an adulthood and adult experiences which their dress and affectations may say they are ready for although their maturity and emotions say otherwise.

Peggy Orenstein has an opinion piece in the New York Times which should be read by parents. In Playing at Sexy Orenstein opines:

Last month, over the course of one workday, six friends sent me a link to the same video along with messages that said, “Have you seen this?” I had, but I clicked it each time anyway. I just couldn’t stop myself. The clip showed a troupe of 8- and 9-year-old Los Angeles girls in a national dance contest. Wearing outfits that would make a stripper blush, they pumped it and bumped it to the Beyoncé hit “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” The girls were spectacular dancers, able to twirl on one foot while extending the other into a perfect standing split. But I doubt that two million people had tuned in simply to admire their arabesques. As with TV phenomena like “Toddlers and Tiaras,” the compulsion to watch was like the impulse to rubberneck at an accident, but in this case the scene was a 12-car pileup of early sexualization....

Sexual entitlement, according to Deborah Tolman, a professor at Hunter College and author of “Dilemmas of Desire: Teenage Girls Talk About Sexuality,” has instead become the latest performance, something girls act out rather than experience. “By the time they are teenagers,” she said, “the girls I talk to respond to questions about how their bodies feel — questions about sexuality or desire — by talking about how their bodies look. They will say something like, ‘I felt like I looked good.’ Looking good is not a feeling.”

Maybe parents are weary from trying to keep a roof over everyone's head and trying to make sure that the family doesn't starve. Maybe parents just want to pick their battles or not battle at all because the one thing that is a premium in their life, at the moment, is some peace at home. What they don't want to or can't confront is the myriad of ways the culture is taking a piece out of their children. Back in the day, there was a slogan, “no justice, no peace.” Now there should be a mantra, no respect and no dignity, no piece of me. Bimbo tarts like Britney and now, Miley should be leaders only in their own voluntary path to their self-destruction. Yes, you may be tired. Yes, you may be weary, but this is one battle you do want to wage. The culture is taking a piece of your child. Stop them before you have to pick up the pieces.

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