Kids on the Catwalk? What’s Wrong with this Picture?
So what’s the big deal? Kids are being taught to “strut their stuff” on the catwalk for a “Global Children’s Fashion Week” event? Many think it’s harmless.
What does it teach a child to be put on display, ogled and evaluated by adults for the purpose of selling designer clothes? Is this to the child’s benefit? If not, then what are the unintended messages it sends?
Here’s a few just for starters:
1. Expensive clothes are more important than you are.
2. You exist to please adults.
3. Learning to show yourself off is also really important.
4. Being real, genuine and private isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
So where’s the boundary? When do you know you’ve crossed it?
The best question to ask is this:
Cui bono: Who benefits? You or your child?
Google+John Ramsey: Still Oblivious After All These Years
“It’s very bizarre,” he says outright. “And, it certainly– Patsy and JonBenet didn’t approach it that way. We– they just did it for fun.”
That’s a full quote of John Ramsey in a recent interview in which he says (finally?) that he regrets that his daughter JonBenet was put in child beauty pageants and comments on the program, Toddlers and Tiaras.
Under fire once again after breaking news that the grand jury in his daughter’s murder case had voted to indict him and his wife for their daughter’s murder, but Alex Hunter said no.
Asked about the current “Tiger Moms” who parade their daughters in programs like Todders and Tiaras, he says, ”Patsy and JonBenet didn’t “approach it that way. We-they just did it for fun.”
In John Ramsey’s revealing comments, he appears to still think Patsy and JonBenet chose it. The fact that he still thinks this was JonBenet’s choice is indicative of an absent and oblivious father. A six-year-old child doesn’t choose to be paraded and sexualized in beauty pageants. Their parents, most often their mothers, choose it. Ramsey initially eludes to his part in the matter and then says it was Patsy and JonBenet who did it “for fun.”
These aren’t “Tiger Moms,” they are “Princess by Proxy” moms.
Not that there isn’t an overlap, but the former primarily pushes the child toward excellence in a “type A” sort of fashion. The latter lives through the child and is oblivious to the child’s separate identity -thus, sexualizing them in highly inappropriate ways. The Huffingont Post just reported on a pageant mother who has been tanning her toddler since she was a baby.
Dads are all too often oblivious to this sort mother-daughter dynamic and parental pathology. Ramsey’s response is illustrative of this. I had a 60′s Dad much like him who thought his only job was to put food on the table. He would have said something quite similar.
Former beauty queens don’t live through their children, put them in pageants, dye their hair, put them on diets, etc. etc. “for fun.” There is just a bit more to it than that. That John Ramsey either believes this or would like us to believe he does is as he puts it, “disturbing.”
Google+Memo to Dara-Lynn Weiss: Living Through Your Daughter Isn’t “Brave”
I’ve never met Dara-Lynn Weiss but a few things about her are certainly familiar to me. Weiss is the “diet mom” who wrote a piece for Vogue about putting her seven-year-old daughter on a diet. The piece was reviled and roundly criticized. What happened after that? She got a book deal.
Ms. Weiss’ unapologetic book, ” The Heavy,” came out last week. In some corners, some of the old criticism has turned to praise. Some have even called her “brave” to dare put her daughter on a diet.
What has happened that a growing number of people accept the idea of food police in their everyday lives and the lives of others? I could write a book. Oh, wait a minute…
There’s so much to say here but just to begin: Mothers don’t have to put their daughters in beauty pageants to suffer from “Princess by Proxy” syndrome. Weiss’ book, the tour and the praise is clearly all about Weiss herself. But who speaks for the children? Just as with extreme pageant moms, we may have to wait a few more decades to find out. In the meantime, Weiss is being rewarded with exactly the kind of national recognition that “Honey Boo Boo”‘s mother Mama June is enjoying. Who would have thunk such different moms had so much in common?
No matter how much a child may say that it doesn’t bother her to be scrutinized and displayed, she cannot answer the question for the same reason that it is inappropriate to thrust her into adulthood in the first place.
By the time these kids can speak out, it’ll be much too late. Finding one’s way to a healthy adulthood is challenging enough. Such unnecessary stumbling blocks of body and boundary violation must not become an accepted part of the popular culture. If they do, who will speak out for children then?
Google+How Do You Define ‘Child Sexualization?’
Before we can have a discussion about whether the sexualization of children is damaging to their development, we need to be able to recognize it when we see it.
Why do some people see the inappropriateness of thrusting children into adult sexuality and others don’t see it at all? It’s unfortunate that the issue is so controversial but therein lies much of the problem.
I began thinking about this over fifteen years ago when I searched for a co-writer to help me write my book. I located an established writer who seemed interested in my story and I traveled to Vermont in the dead of winter to meet her. She looked at a few of the more disturbing pictures from my personal album (they are not in the book) of me at about the age of six, draped across a stone ledge, one leg up in a Marilyn Monroe-like pose and a grown-up pout on my face.
The writer’s response was, “I don’t see a problem with these.” Maybe she expected to see something more like kiddie porn. Needless to say, she wasn’t destined to help me with my book. Ultimately, I had to write it myself with the help of a terrific editor, Jessica Swift.
We often project adult sensibilities onto children and forget that they haven’t reached those sensibilities yet. Or, we have been sensitized to a parade of overly-precocious children in sitcoms and elsewhere who are usually smarter and more sympathetic characters than their parents.
There has always been a healthy debate about exposing children to sexual material in movies and entertainment. Isn’t that why we have a film ratings system which is constantly revamped every decade or so? There are laws protecting minors from all manner of adult activity including drinking, gambling and marriage licenses. Yet, child sexualization is hard for some people to recognize and it is controversial.
Here’s a working definition of child sexualization: 1) Displaying or exposing a child in an age-inappropriate manner or in sexual situations. 2) Using a child for the titilation or glorification of an adult.
What would you add or change?
Barbara Walters Chooses ‘Honey Boo Boo:’ Say it Ain’t So, Barbara!
I finally did it. I watched the segment of the Barbara Walters Special in which she features Honey Boo Boo and her family. Walters named Alana Thompson one of the “Ten Most Fascinating People of 2012.”
Ms. Walters chose not to interview the family directly but presented previously seen clips. Apparently, she took a lot of heat for her choice which also helped to publicize her special before it aired. Intentionally or not, Alana was used to sell Walters’ program just as she has continued to be used by her mother and her family to garner money, recognition and fame.
What is most curious, is that the most “fascinating” questions as to why Honey Boo Boo has been so fascinating in 2012, were never asked, questions like:
- Why do people watch this show and why were its ratings higher in some markets, than the national political conventions?
- Fifteen years after the JonBenet Ramsey case, why is there a show called “Toddlers and Tiaras” and why is it more popular than ever?
- Why do parents keep putting their kids in beauty pageants?
As in the case of many television programs, initially people tune in for a little escape and perhaps some curiosity. Many can’t believe a show like this is even on TV. But if they become a regular watcher, they may be getting seduced in somewhat the same way as the participants and the parents. The voyeuristic quality of this whole endeavor feeds on itself. (yet another not-so-inadvertant food pun.)
Hollywood has never had good boundaries when it comes to child stars. The long list of children who hit adolescence just in time for an adult meltdown, is legendary in Hollywood. From Michael Jackson, to Lindsay Lohan, show biz has rarely had positive long-term effects on kids.
One has to wonder who is leading whom. Does the media lead the culture or is it creating it? In this case, individual citizens must begin to educate and lead the media by refusing to watch a spectacle in which children are being robbed of their childhoods before our very eyes.
Apparently, Barbara Walters was seduced too. It’s unfortunate that she didn’t use the opportunity to shed real light on Princess by Proxy Syndrome and the damaging consequences that await a whole new generation of little girls.
Google+Diets and Display: What’s the Connection?
Child beauty pageants and issues about food and weight seem to go together like pizza and beer, peanut butter and jelly, lettuce and tomato. –But why? In the case of “Honey Boo Boo,” we see a child who is a bit chubby, with a food-obsessed family and an overweight mother. I was a bit chubby too, but had a thin-obsessed mother who wanted desperately for me to be as thin as she had been when she was put on the stage by her mother.In both cases however, weight and diets figure prominently and usually do in families who put their children on display. What’s the connection? In most people’s lives, food is about much more than sustenence. It’s about control, it’s about nurturing, and it’s about boundaries. When food is the instrument that expresses a dysfunctional family, it also becomes the tool that expresses separation from that dysfunction.Whether Honey decides to assert her independence by becoming diet-conscious, or whether she becomes just as heavy as her mother, these issues have been thrust upon her by a family that is feeding off her appearance and cuteness. Can Honey ever truly be an independent person as she grows older? Time will tell. In the meantime, pass the pork rinds, but for heaven’s sake, not too many.Honey Boo Boo: Fighting Back?
It looks like the “Honey Boo Boo” craze may soon come to an end, not unlike pet rocks and mood rings. But in those cases there weren’t damaging consequences in real and human terms.
Interestingly, it may be Alana Thompson (‘Honey Boo Boo’) herself who takes the responsibility of putting the kibosh on her role as the family’s gravy train. This may not even be conscious, but either way, good for her.
A short video of Alana as she acts out on Dr. Drew is being used as a “tease” for a longer interview to be aired tonight.
Both Dr. Drew and her mother are clearly embarrassed by Alana’s behavior as she almost hits Dr. Drew, pretends to sleep and then snorts in his face. Clearly, this is not how she has been coached to behave.
Alana may have discovered how much power she really has and is responding in a more sane way than most of the people around her. How sad when children are charged with the responsibility of setting boundaries that adults won’t.
Take a look at the video for yourself. I’d like to hear what you think. Click Here
PEOPLE: Sexiest woman?
Honey Boo Boo: Woman?
I did a double take. Looking for a picture of Honey Boo Boo that didn’t make me cringe, I combed a plethora of them on the internet. Maybe I could find one of her looking like the chubby child she is; or perhaps one without the layers of makeup and sans wig plopped like a bird’s nest on her head.
Instead, I came across a parody of a very real looking PEOPLE magazine cover calling her “the sexiest woman alive.” Should we be surprised at such a parody when she is treated and rewarded for behaving precisely like one?
A large part of the culture has lost it’s way. They have trouble seeing how sexualizing children can profoundly damage their development. I suppose that calling this little girl a sexy woman points out just how out of control this trend has become. Perhaps that was the intent. What’s not funny is little girls being robbed of childhood. Many continue to search for it throughout their lives. Thus, they become perpetual children, robbed of portions of their adulthood as well.
The culture that created this debacle must now be the entity to draw the line–not with bans on beauty pageants or absurd, blanket regulations–but with a true understanding of generational boundaries and child development that puts it out of favor.
Google+Why doesn’t spellcheck recognize the word “sexualization?”
Perhaps it’s just a lag in technology, or maybe it’s a lag in sensibility, but the word “sexualization” as in, the sexualization of girls is not recognized as a word in spellcheck. If we can’t recognize it as a word, how can we hope to recognize it as a syndrome?
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