More Dubious Reporting on Kids

This time, the headline is "Kid products too 'sexy,' experts say." The article is from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, syndicated in Red State Capital City Newspaper. It talks about Bratz (hello? Bratz are news??), and "thong underwear emblazoned with sexually suggestive phrases for 6-year-old girls" and a survey that says "most American children 8 and older have televisions in their bedrooms, without parental rules about what they watch."

My first response is the dubious personal retort: I don't know a single eight year old who has a television in his or her bedroom, and I know a lot of eight year olds. Just checked with M, who knows more eight year olds than I do, and she can't think of one who has their own television.

More importantly, however, I think there's a real methodological problem in looking only at products and ignoring what kids do with those products, not to mention the actual effects those products have on kids. I don't like Bratz--I think they're trashy and ugly and their name valorizes, well, brattiness. I don't let my kids buy them. But lots of their friends have them, and all the girls love them. Why? Because they're trendy and hip. What do they do with them? They put outfits on them. They take the outfits off. They put new outfits on them. Just like they do with Barbie and Groovy Girls and American Girl dolls. Sometimes they play school, sometimes they play rock star. They never play "Let's go hang out on the street corner and pick up guys," even though that's about all a Bratz doll looks good for. They are DOLLS, and kids, at least, know this.

Let's talk about clothes. There's a big outcry about low-cut jeans and midriff-baring shirts for tweens. My kids wear low-cut jeans and midriff-baring shirts all the time. They're hip and they're comfortable. What do they do in their low-cut jeans and midriff-baring shirts? They ride their bikes, they go out for ice cream, they jump rope on the front sidewalk, they watch Hilary Duff DVDS. They don't wander around looking for boys who might be impressed by their hot outfits. So they're showing a few inches of belly--what's the big deal? Is it the kids who are sexualized, or is the problem the adults who think a child's belly is obscene?

On the other hand, I don't let my kids wear the two-inch heels that seem to be all the rage for pre-teens. Why? Because they're not safe and they won't be able to run around. I hate seeing a little girl hobbling around in heels, but what always seems most ridiculous is a little girl on the jungle gym in high heels. They're still little girls, and most of them are still doing little girl things, regardless of what they're wearing.

I've argued about this with people before. I agree that our culture is more sexualized than it was, and maybe my sample is way skewed. As I've said before, we're in the suburbs, we're in middle America, and most of the people in our community are white, though they are very class-diverse. But I do think that simply talking to "experts" and reading products as cultural indicators is not enough. You need to talk to real kids and observe what they're really doing, and not enough people seem willing to do that.

[M read this and she agrees with me, though she would offer a more nuanced distinction between Bratz, Barbies, Groovy Girls and American Girl dolls, if this were her blog.]

[And if "expert" Diane Levin really believes the "apparently growing popularity of oral sex" is due to Bratz and Desperate Housewives, she 1) should talk to people who were teenagers in the 60s and 70s about how much oral sex they were actually having, and 2) might want to look at issues like AIDS, abstinence education, and teen pregnancy rates which, it seems to me, have a much more significant effect, whether bad or good, on teen sexual practices.]