Idolising Children?

In today’s Age Larissa Dubeki writes a suitably outraged opinion piece on hair removal products and brazillians beng marketed to the tween market - “Why 10 is too young for your first Brazillian”. The issue is endemic. In researching our next book, my wife Tania has established that the broad range of tween magazines are selling sex and adult concepts of sex to children as young as six.

The debate on this issue is really reaching a climax, but beyond bans on products, advertising and greater regulation of advertising (all which are needed). There is little discussion about why children are being marketed to in this way, how we let it get to this point, why we let it continue and what else can be done about it.

I don’t have a suite of answers to those questions - except to ask them, and then ask us to look at our culture more broadly.

I’d contend that the reason childhood is more sexualised is that our culture is becoming more sexualised. Of course that is a very simple way of defining it, but children live in the same society we do. The idea we can stop them from being exposed to the world in which they live is somewhat naieve.

Can we have a culture where the objectification of women can still be so rife and the demands placed on very specific and often demeaning forms of beauty and sexuality that we can completely shield our children from? I doubt it. The values of a society seep through to the new generations.

So, at some point in the debates about the sexualisation of childhood we have to start having a discussion about the sexualisation of adulthood.

The surprise of the New Year was to find out I was being quoted in the New York Times.

That be said, it was one line. But, hey, it was a mention in the New York Times.

The article from Brian Stelter gives a reasonable overview of the argument. I feel he left me a little short though. The full quote from which my quote was taken was:

Adults may think it is respectful to let children make their own decisions, but it isn’t. Especially at a young age children don’t have enough experience or knowledge to make a wide range of decisions. Respect is supporting children’s development, guiding their decision-making and giving them the capacity to understand that you can’t do everything.

But, with a National Press Club in Washington, an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show and David Letterman’s The Late Show and the announcement by the Australian Government that Bindi with be a “tourism ambassador” for Australia we have an eight-year-old girl whose father has recently died, whose mother is still grieving, keeping the schedule of an A-grade celebrity. And, not one person is standing up and saying, “Is this appropriate?”

At the time my issue was, and still is, the idea that respecting children means letting them make all of their own decisions. This simply isn’t the case. Children need to have their development supported and this means in the case of children engaged in public life they need to be supported to enjoy what they are doing, but also adults need to make decisions when enough is enough.

Was impressed at yesterday’s filming of the Insight program…they engaged really well with the children in the audience in a respectful way.

I made the point that the children demonstrated that they have the capacity to talk about and understand issues relating to advertising and branding…hopefully that doesn’t end up on the cutting room floor.

Anyway - you can see it at 7.30pm tonight on SBS.

http://news.sbs.com.au/insight/topic.php?id=130