And you wonder why we have issues.
What I think is crazy I that in the video the narrator says “Tweens spend 24 million dollars a year” I love how it makes it sound like these children are earning this money, driving themselves to that mall and going shopping while telling their parents to just be patient, “We’ll get ice cream when we are done if your good”. “Tweens” are not spending this money, their parents are letting allowing them to. Somewhere I think that parents think this is somehow “cute” and that it is an expression of their “femininity” which I find very telling about where women’s heads are. When you start to tell your daughter that her body and her image, and the augmentation of it is the root of her femininity, there is a problem, not with the kid but with the mother.

Here is a note:

It’s not cute to dress your 4 year old like a stripper 6 year olds are not supposed to be worried about being hot! 8 Year old shouldn’t be pushing whatever they might have up!!

I find it interesting that more and more celebrity and pseudo- celebrity parents are falling prey to this. Perhaps it’s the fishbowl effect of the ubiquitous paparazzi that makes them feel like they, and by extension their children must always be camera ready. Suri Cruise running around in sub-degree weather in ballroom heels is just ridiculous, it’s not cute it’s crazy. You see the women on the Real Housewives franchise dressing their children like baby dolls and forcing them to accessorize and sit to get their nails done when they would much rather be playing in the dirt.

What Dr. Michael Bradley says in the clip below is absolutely right, these objects, and this mentality not only sexualizes these children but also robs these young girls of their childhood, while creating a belief system in the process, I am not good enough I need make-up and a push up bra to be beautiful, or feminine. We are all so afraid of pedophiles and child predators yet somehow we are dressing our children as bait. I am not making and excuse but seeing a child dressed as a miniature version of a full grown sexualized woman can not help the situation.

Look I went to the hair salon with my mother and got my Shirley Temple curls for Easter, it was a special occasion and I regarded it as such. I think that getting mommy and me mani- pedi’s is is a cute bonding experience at a certain age, and fun and sweet. But when your 5 year old says that she couldn’t possibly go to the playground with her nails looking like this, well then I think you might have gone too far…..