Little Girls Gone Wild: Why Daughters Are Acting Too Sexy, Too Soon
There's been a lot of noise about little girls acting and dressing way too sexy lately. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't that concerned when Miley Cyrus took her clothes off, or when her then-9-year-old sister, Noah, showed up for a Los Angeles Halloween event dressed in what looked like a Goth hooker outfit. (Those crazy child stars, I said to myself.) I rolled my eyes at the YouTube clip of scantily clad 8- and 9-year-olds in a dance competition, pelvis-thrusting to Beyoncé's "Single Ladies"; it reminded me of the show Toddlers & Tiaras - disturbing, but very different from the reality of most kids. But then I started hearing reports from my real-life friends. One complained that they only make padded training bras now and that her sixth-grader looked like a Pamela Anderson wannabe. Another called to talk about her 6-year-old's dance-recital costume: fuchsia hotpants with heart appliqués on each buttock. The insanity seems to be trickling down to real girls - our girls.
The terrifying truth: It starts with princesses
My innocent toddler is already a prime marketing target, I learn when I speak to Peggy Orenstein, the author of a new book, Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture. In Orenstein's book she makes the case that girlhood really is different today: more commercialized (companies spent $100 million in advertising to kids in 1983; today they spend almost $17 billion), more girly (nearly everything manufactured for girls - from birth - is screamingly, irritatingly, blindingly pink), and increasingly sexualized.
Related:When to say NO and when to say NOTHING
Orenstein builds her case with stats showing that the more a girl is exposed to girly-girl culture, the more vulnerable she is to depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, and risky sexual behavior. She describes one study in which college girls shown just two commercials with stereotyped portrayals of women - a girl raving about acne medicine and a woman thrilled with a brownie mix - expressed less interest in math- and science-related careers afterward than girls who hadn't been shown the ads. These days, the average child in America watches an estimated 40,000 ads a year.
Related:How to point your daughters in the right direction
What begins with Cinderella is followed by less innocent stuff
TV programs like Hannah Montana and iCarly, which center around eye-rolling, miniskirt-clad girls whose idea of success is being a rock diva or a reality star. Their rapt audience - most in the 6-to-11-year-old demographic - follows the shows and the offscreen lives of their stars with wide-eyed curiosity. And then so many of those tween idols - girls such as Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, even Miley - wind up as premature sex symbols, headed for a fall.
Related: The Great Mom Debate: Would You Let Your Child Enter a Beauty Pageant?
"It's a pattern," Orenstein says. "They go from being role models, doing things like wearing promise rings, doing charity work, and what's the next step? They take their clothes off or head to rehab. The road to female identity is rocky right now, and these stars are traveling it in a writ-large, public way that reflects, in a smaller way, the dilemmas real girls face." So how do you keep your little girl from becoming that girl, when the line between good femme fun and scary consumerism is so faint?
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