The Sexualization of Early Childhood

 

Many parents, family members, and early childhood professionals today express concerns about raising children in a highly sexualized culture. According to the ideas presented in the book excerpt, so sexy so soon, children are being bombarded with messages in the advertising and media industries linking physical beauty and sexual attractiveness with happiness. The authors assert that young children’s exposure to an overly sexualized environment plays a significant role in undermining their healthy gender and sexual development and negatively impacts their sense of self -worth.

 

The older individual sees the younger generation as to explicit in dress, too much  make-up, and social behavior, many of the older generation are still in the “children are to be seen and not heard.”  Girls are wearing make-up at a younger age, boy are asking girls out on dates at a younger age.  I can agree that many of the younger generation today have to take on adult roles because most parents either work or are on drug, including alcoholism and children look in all the wrong places for love.

In what ways have you observed the sexualization of early childhood in your own personal and professional experiences?

I have observed young girls are dressing like teenagers and teenagers are dressing like grown women. They are noticing their bodies looking like models and movie stars and they are striving for attention and using their bodies to do so. I watch very little television and when I do I try to watch the stuff my daughter watches.  If I give a child a complement it’s about “the pretty flower on their shirt or the pretty color on their shoes. I try not to focus the attention on their personal appearance like “You’re so pretty or you’re a cutie pie.” I try to put the focus on and object not their looks. Children already have enough to worry about than focusing on their looks.

 What examples have you encountered in store advertisements, television, the Internet, other types of media, and/or other types of environments?

What I have noticed more of in advertising is that advertisements focus almost everything on sexuality. The product itself is not what the focus is on.  This society is so focused on making money that it does not look at the affect it has on the person watching it. I feel alcohol beverages should not be a television commercial until certain times of the night when only adults can see it. I don’t watch television during the day and I cannot tell you about the commercials. What I see at night is fast food commercials, match making commercials, and a few other commercials that may have good intentions.

When it comes to the internet it is so easy for a child to access porn and there explicit advertisements and the people that advertise this know that a child has access and that I believe is why there are advertisements that suggest you put blocks on the computers and some television stations.

Sexualization has also been a subject of debate for academics who work in media and cultural studies. Here, the term has not been used to simply to label what is seen as a social problem, but to indicate the much broader and varied set of ways in which sex has become more visible in media and culture. These include; the widespread discussion of sexual values, practices and identities in the media; the growth of sexual media of all kinds; for example, erotica, slash fiction, sexual self-help books and the many genres of pornography; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience, for example instant message or avatar sex made possible by developments in technology; a public concern with the breakdown of consensus about regulations for defining and dealing with obscenity; the prevalence of scandals, controversies and panics around sex in the media.(Attwood, 2006)

How might these messages impact children and their healthy development?

This type of advertisement could give a child the wrong idea about how they should behave. Children may think its ok to wear clothes that covers nothing or that it’s ok. Examples; “Some commercial products seen as promoting the sexualization of children have drawn considerable media attention: Bratz Baby dolls that wear thongs, Girls aged 10 and 11 wearing thongs in primary school. (BBC News, 2003) Padded bras on bikinis aimed at seven-year-old girls. Some people regard training bras similarly. However there is also evidence that with the mean age of puberty declining in Western cultures, functional brassieres are required by a higher percentage of preteen girls than before. (Aksglaede, 2009)  

Consider the ways they might influence gender identity, what children learn about being a girl or a boy, the expectations children may develop about gender, and other related concerns. What can early childhood professionals do to tackle this problem and reduce the negative effects that it has on young children?

Sex education classes are being taught in the schools. Parents and teachers think it is ok for their child to learn about sex education in a classroom of peers their own age. What they should be teaching is home economics. Children are no longer playing house they’re doing it. I believe in parents knowing what their child is learning in school. If we are teaching sex education classes with the parents’ permission, then the parents should be in the class too.

 

 

Attwood, Feona (2006). ‘Sexed Up: Theorizing the Sexualization of Culture.’ ‘’Sexualities’’ 9(1), pp. 77-94. and Attwood, Feona (ed.) (2009) Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture. London & New York: I.B.Tauris.

BBC News. 2003-05-28. Retrieved February 22, 2007. "Parents have been urged by a head teacher to stop their daughters wearing thongs to a primary school http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/2943874.stm

Aksglaede L, Sorensen K, Petersen JH, Skakkebaek NE & Juul A. (2009) Recent decline in age at breast development: the Copenhagen Puberty Study. Pediatrics 123, e932–e939.