News location:

Canberra Today 25°/28° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Sexy’s not for kids

MOTHER-of-two Ana Amini recently took aim at Target with an open letter expressing concern that some of the kids’ clothes sold by the retailer made little girls, aged 7 to 14, “look like tramps”. 

Sonya Fladun
Sonya Fladun
All value judgements aside about the use of the word “tramp”, as a mother of a young daughter I do understand what she meant. So did about 60,000 other people who “liked” her Facebook comments. For Target, it was a social media frenzy they would clearly have preferred not to have encountered.

To be fair to retailers, there’s a chicken-and-egg aspect to the debate about contemporary kids’ fashion and what some critics see as the creeping sexualisation of modern childhood.

After all, Target wouldn’t be selling clothes that are really just shrunk-down versions of teenage and young-adult fashion unless there was a demand for such items. And as much as our daughters might want that pair of leopard-print hot pants, it’s parents that buy the clothes our kids wear.

I don’t think anyone should be too judgmental about all this. Not all parents want to dress their child in pinafore dresses. We all view things differently and what may seem to be inappropriate wear to one person may seem totally right and proper to another.

Still, I do think parents should be more aware of the dangers of allowing our kids to be pawns of consumer culture and pushed to grow up too fast.
Our children are bombarded with advertisements, movies, magazines with sexualised images of women and girls. This isn’t going to change – certainly not anytime soon. So I think the best thing to do is to be up front and talk it through with our kids.

This was brought home a few weeks back when our little girl came in from school – dancing, swinging her hips and singing: “If you’re sexy and you know it, clap your hands”.

She really didn’t have any idea what “sexy” meant. She just associated it with something girls wanted to be and an image she had seen.
This performance triggered a long conversation about better words to aspire to or describe herself as “sassy”, “smart” or “strong”.

To me, and I’m sure many other parents, “sexy” is a word that shouldn’t relate to a child or a tween. But the importance of being sexy isn’t lost on kids. Hence their desire to look like pop and movie stars and our need, as parents, to tackle these questions head on.

So I’ve decided to take the demystifying path – to talk to my son and daughter about why I don’t like the word “sexy”, at least applied to them, and how they both need to aim and look for so much more in life.

Encouraging our kids to be happy and confident in themselves, content to be children first before they grow up – to me that has to be the real target.

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Share this

Leave a Reply

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews