Thanks to the Olympics, it’s hard not to see images of women (and girls) persisting, pushing themselves to their physical limits and dealing as gracefully with failure as with success. But yeah, this is really an anomaly. Pretty soon, your offspring will go back to being deluged with Paris Hilton and ads for “future porn star” tee-shirts instead of Natalie Coughlin and Kristin Armstrong. In other words, back to our creepily oversexed culture.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m in no ways puritanical. I can’t wait to talk sex with my kids. (Well, you know what I mean.) But it freaks me out that a lot of young girls on TV today resemble blow-up dolls. And it freaked me out when I heard a preschooler at the store the other day ask her mom, “Do I look hot?” Uh, no. You look four.

In the new book, So Sexy So Soon, authors Diane Levin, PhD, and Jean Kilbourne, EdD, make a powerful point. While it’s totally normal and natural for young kids to be curious about sex, what’s not okay is for kids to be increasingly bombarded with sexual messages they don’t understand.

From the book’s intro:

When sex in the media is talked about, it is often criticized from a puritanical perspective—there’s too much of it, it’s too blatant, it will encourage kids to be promiscuous. But sex in commercial culture has far more to do with trivializing and objectifying sex than with promoting it, more to do with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that sex as portrayed in the media is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical. The exploitation of our children’s sexuality is in many ways designed to promote consumerism, not just in childhood but throughout their lives.

Outlawing TV isn’t going to save your daughter from wanting to look like Barbie or your son to want to date a Barbie-lookalike when he’s old enough. What will: being pro-active. Teaching your kiddos how to be aware of and how to interpret all the sexxxy messages out there.

Check out these tips from Levin and Kilbourne on prepping your kids for an oversexed world. And please, do your part. Stop buying those hideous Bratz dolls.

–Posted by Stephanie Booth

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