Every few weeks, I visit my mother to have dinner and catch up
on the goings-on in the community, and she occasionally hits me
with a real doozy.
She informed me that police in Calabasas had reportedly caught
two teenagers having sex behind the local movie theater. This
wasn’t terribly newsworthy until my mom told me the children
were 13 years old.
Fittingly, The Associated Press published the results of a study
a few days later, saying that teenagers who listened to music with
“degrading sexual messages” were more likely to lose
their virginity earlier.
Beginning in 2001, researchers polled over 1,400 teenagers about
listening habits and sexual activity, then checked back with the
same teens in 2002 and 2004. By the end of the study, 51 percent of
the teenagers who listened to sexually explicit music started
having sex within two years. By comparison, of the teenagers who
said they did not listen to sexually explicit music, 29 percent
started having sex by the end of the study.
This is the latest in an ongoing fight by adults to protect
children from the media. True, songs like Nelly Furtado’s
“Promiscuous” and games like “Grand Theft
Auto” may influence children toward risky behavior.
Yet I think we would be serving our children far better if we
actually treated them like children.
Psychologist David Elkind published “The Hurried
Child” in 1981, which discussed the hazards of parents
shuttling children between activities like music lessons and soccer
practice, arguing that parental pushing ruined child
development.
Child psychologist Roberta Golinkoff also argues against the
increasing prevalence of parents getting children on a fast track
toward college by doing things like paying for tutoring for
4-year-olds.
“The American consumer with young children has been made
to feel anxious and concerned about children and achievement, and
it’s a tremendous disservice,” Golinkoff told the
Boston Globe.
Further, Jed Smith of tutoring service The Princeton Review told
the Globe that spending a few thousand dollars to give children a
head start can be an excellent investment.
“There’s a big difference between Middlebury and
UMass,” Smith told the paper.
Remember, Smith is saying this about children who may not be old
enough to ride without a car seat or drink without the aid of a
sippy-cup.
Yet this pressure to grow up extends beyond anxious parents and
money-hungry tutoring services. Today’s children are in the
middle of a perfect storm of factors that can negatively impact
them.
Many people who played video games as children in the 1980s have
grown up and want to play games targeted at adults, yet video games
are still considered toys and are marketed toward young and
old.
This is how “Grand Theft Auto” appeals to
8-year-olds: Adult content is being released for game machines that
can be purchased at Toys “R” Us, yet that same adult
content is sold at Toys “R” Us because people
erroneously believe that video games are solely children’s
toys. Pornographic DVDs aren’t sold in Best Buy, as
there’s a chance children could get ahold of them. The same
idea, however, doesn’t apply to games. Sony: 1. Oblivious
adults: 0.
There’s also the example of Abercrombie & Fitch, which
took flak in 2002 for selling thong underwear designed for girls as
young as 7 with phrases like “eye candy” and
“wink wink” on the crotch. A spokesperson for
Abercrombie described these underoos to the Milwaukee
Journal-Sentinel as “cute and fun and sweet.”
A double-standard exists for children. Parents are afraid their
child will not be able to compete in a fast-paced world and attempt
to prepare them for college, signalling that it’s time to
grow up.
However, parents can fail to realize the message this sends.
Like Elkind said 25 years ago, parents are pushing children into so
many activities that they no longer have time to simply be kids. If
children are preoccupied with thinking about college in elementary
school, they’re likely thinking about other aspects of
growing up, such as sex.
Child psychologist Sylvia Rimm, after interviewing over 5,000
middle school students nationwide in 2005, told the Houston
Chronicle that children who were “pushed toward adult
behavior” may be “distracted spending too much time
thinking of age-inappropriate activities such as sex,” as
well as “lured by sex or alcohol at an earlier
age.”
Exactly what sort of message are we sending by telling children
to prepare for adult life at a young age, minus the sex?
Grow up, but not too much.
Humphrey can’t wait to see an 8-year-old with a
Blackberry playing BrickBreaker in front of Diddy Riese. E-mail him
at humphrey@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.