So Sexy So Soon?

I share this book, So Sexy So Soon by Diane E. Levin, Ph.D. & Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D.


The authors description of this book.. Read on! (and I can't say enough about this book! A must for every parent!)

Children desperately need your help and we want to help you give it to them. Most parents know something is terribly wrong. But it isn’t easy to connect all the dots between the experiences you are having with your children and what is going on in the culture, never mind figuring out what to do about it once you make the connections. This book will connect the dots. As you read, you will develop a lens that will help you see more clearly how the graphic sexual messages that permeate the lives of your children—both girls and boys—are harming them in ways that go far beyond what they’re learning about sex. Once you have that lens, we’ll show you how it can help you find ways to protect your children. You will also see that you are not alone!

Parents and professionals everywhere are struggling to deal with this new sexualized environment and often feel confused about how best to respond. The primary focus of So Sexy So Soon is on children, girls and boys, from preschool through the tween years. This is when the foundation is laid for later sexual behavior and relationships. This is when you can make the biggest difference in reducing the negative impact of the sexualization of childhood on your children. We also show you how what you do in the early years paves the way for staying connected with your children when the stakes get higher in adolescence.

It’s important to acknowledge that there are variations in how children are affected by today’s sexualized childhood—based on their gender and their racial, cultural, and socioeconomic group as well as their individual disposition. And children’s marketers actually use sophisticated techniques to target different demographic groups. We wish we had enough space to go into all these variations in this book, but we don’t. Nonetheless, So Sexy So Soon is relevant for all children, because the ways in which kids internalize the messages are very much the same, and no child growing up today can fully escape today’s sexualized environment.

We want to make you a promise. It’s not fair that your job is made so much harder than it needs to be by the sexualized media and commercial culture. Society should support you in your efforts rather than set up roadblocks at every turn. If society supported parents in their job, we wouldn’t need to write this book. Too often you, the parents, are told that the problem of sexualized childhood is your fault: If you
were doing your job right and could just learn to say no, then there wouldn’t be a problem.

Casting blame on parents is a smoke screen that diverts attention from where the blame rightfully belongs—squarely on the shoulders of the purveyors of these media and marketing messages, those who exploit our children’s developmental vulnerabilities by using sex to make huge profits.

We promise to keep the blame squarely where it belongs. Without promising that So Sexy So Soon will help you solve all the problems you and your children face, we will help you find many ways you can make life a whole lot better for your children (and for you) than it otherwise might be. And while we will help you banish many of the evils that the sexualized childhood creates in your children’s lives, we will not ask you to banish all of them. Rather, we will show you how to work with the evils that do get in and transform them into positive lessons for your children. We will show you how to help your children expand their horizons in ways that respect who they are as individuals. Today’s sexualized childhood is very distressing, there’s no way around that.

Check out Abercrombie's KIDS clothing ads...wow!