Let children be children.

Great Debates
1

I was cycling home from work yesterday in the early evening after dark.

I passed three girls aged about eleven years old dressed in the sort of clothes that young women wear when out on the “Pull”,they were wearing makeup and jewellerey,their hair had been styled and dyed.

To put it into context I am talking about southern England here.

I am not a Bible thumping Puritan,I love sex,drinking and having fun.

I do not think for one moment that the parents of those girls were Pikeys,perverts or the human dross that every culture suffers from.
That is what worries me,Ill bet that their Mums and Dads are saying "Well they’re only young once " and “its only a bit of fun” and other moronic platitudes.
Apart from paedophiles and child pregnancies, this sort of mindset is bringing psychological pressures that young adults and older teenagers have to suffer on to those who are the least equipped to deal with ie children

Never mind theP.C. tripe about how wonderfully grown up and intelligent our kids are,in reality in Britain at least,our kids are on about the Dodo level of survivability compared with those of thirty years ago.
I cant speak for Americans or people from other countries.

I cant see that it would do any harm except to some childrens clothing manufacturers if it was made illegal for children to wear makeup and jewellery and not be allowed to style or dye their hair.

Also have them wear school uniforms,it allows a degree of protection for the kids and also gives the kids a sense that if they are anti social outside of school then they can be tracked down,.v

2

Yes. Making such things illegal will certainly stop children from doing those things. I see no problem with this whatsoever.

I’m not entirely sure I see the link between clothing manufacturers and makeup, jewellery and dyed hair. Perhaps this was a cunning method of avoiding saying there should be mandatory clothing standards.

3

I agree that too many young girls are dressing way too provocatively. But I strongly disagree with the angle about illegalizing the things you are suggesting. For one thing, there’s too much wiggle room. You say to illegalize young girls wearing makeup. Really? What about Halloween? What about the fact that if I don’t put Chapstick on my 8-year-old in the winter, her lips get horrendously chapped? Would Chapstick count as makeup? No? What if it was tinted? I also allow her to wear pale pink or pale beige nail polish. Do you think that’s too mature for an 8-year-old (ftr, she’s interested in this stuff because my 16-year-old wears makeup, and my little one idolizes her big sis).

IMO, a much more effective approach is a financial one. Companies make too-mature clothing and makeup and hair color for young girls because young girls buy these things (and even worse, their parents buy it for them!) Start a movement to get parents to exercise a little more control over what their children buy and how their children dress. If this stuff didn’t sell so well, the manufacturers would stop making it.

I do understand that even with parents exercising as much control as they can, girls in the age group you’re describing are going to engage in certain behaviors. Heck, my mom’s mom didn’t allow my mom to wear pants (too provocative, she thought), so my mom would leave the house in a skirt and blouse, with a pair of pants folded up in her over-sized purse, and change into pants somewhere else.

Still, I think responsibility for this horrible trend lays with parents, not the legal system.

4

There will be a backlash and it will become less stylish.

5

I think it’s worthwhile to note that as soon as both my daughters hit the seventh and eighth grade (that’s age 12 and 13 here), they immediately evinced a strong desire to wear makeup and to get their ears pierced.

And as soon as I told them, “You can get your ears pierced as soon as you can pay for it yourself, and you can wear makeup as soon as you require it to attract a mate, because that’s what wearing makeup is all about”, they both got their ears pierced as soon as they could save up enough allowance, and they both ended up wearing just enough makeup that they could demonstrate “I’m wearing makeup!” to their peer group, but not enough so’s their mom could really tell, other than the debris left on the bathroom sink. We never had to have the discussion that goes, “You’re not going out looking like THAT, are you?!” I only had to make some dismissive remark once, to both girls, about “trailer park trash” vis-a-vis overly heavy eye makeup, and they both immediately took the point.

IOW, once I removed makeup and ear piercing as potential parental rebellion tools, they made sensible decisions. If I had told them forbiddingly, “Only Jezebels get their ears pierced, and only Scarlet Women wear makeup”, they would have piled it on defiantly, and it would have been a major bone of contention for years.

So when you see a group of Tweens wearing Jezebel outfits, there’s more going on there than parents simply turning a blind eye, “It’s only a bit of fun.” There’s peer pressure, and adolescent breaking-away, and parents who may not know how to handle things once their sweet little princess is suddenly too big–and bad-tempered–to sit on their lap and be read a bedtime story.

My youngest daughter, who is now a senior in high school (nearly 18), sings with the Millikin Youth Chorale, an after-school auditioned glee club for students age 11 through 18, performing adult level choral music. And last year they went on a trip to St. Louis to perform in a shared concert with a St. Louis Catholic girls school choir.

And the Catholic girls school choir (which performed all works with sacred texts), while demonstrably as nice a bunch of girls as you could hope to find in any middle-class community, still, with their obviously mandated plain hairstyles and lack of makeup, looked…dull.

When my group got up there next, with their (to me) normal middle-class hairstyles–even the girls who didn’t go in for dyeing and styling still obviously had had their hair carefully cut by a salon, not by their mom in the bathroom–and their collective modicum of tasteful makeup, they looked absolutely smashing.

And I sat there celebrating the completely different mindset that would allow every one of those girls the freedom to explore her personality through the medium of her hairstyle and makeup.

And I pitied the Catholic girls, who weren’t allowed.

6

I don’t see how making anything illegal could possibly do any good. That would be an awful idea.

That said, the clothing styles for young girls these days are one of my soap-box topics. I have two little girls (currently 7 and 4) and have been horrified by the clothes in stores since the oldest was about 2. I work pretty hard at getting them good, cute, kid playclothes, and luckily we can afford to spend a little extra money on Lands End or something when necessary.

Because the cheaper the store, the trampier the clothes. WalMart is the worst, Target and Mervyns are bad, Kohls is so-so, and so on up the line. As a result, the less money and time you have, the more difficult it is to give your daughter clothes that aren’t sleazy.

Likewise, you have to be a strict parent who doesn’t mind saying no all the time, because we’re fighting a multi-billion dollar industry that deliberately sets out to overwhelm children with attractive and inappropriate stuff (not just clothes but food, toys, everything) and to teach children that parents are to be despised and disobeyed. Thus you go food shopping and say no to aisles of attractive junk food, go to Target and say no to Bratz, and when you’re in the clothing department, you say no to glittery short skirts and t-shirts that say “Princess Brat” on them. The less time and money you have to invest in all this effort, the more difficult it is to fight these daily battles.

And your 5yo doesn’t understand about inappropriate clothing–all she sees is a cute skirt with glitter. She doesn’t realize that it’s a small copy of a skirt that was designed to make a 16yo look like a hooker.

I would love to see more tough play clothes instead of glittery velvet bellbottoms, too. Girls are supposed to play and get dirty and hang upside-down on the bars, not act like they’re on a runway all the time. And I’d love to see more playdresses that really are playdresses–my daughters love to wear casual dresses, but there aren’t many out there.

So, no, I don’t think that making laws would help a jot. If parents refuse to buy the clothes and ask for real kid clothes instead, it could happen. But it would take mass effort. The one letter I wrote to Mervyns a few years ago didn’t do much (I wrote it after I went in there and was unable to find a single thing that I would put on my daughter, that wasn’t sleazy and cheap-looking. The reply I got was pretty dismissive, so I boycotted them completely for a year or so, until better stuff was available.)

7

See, I haven’t had much trouble finding my 8YO appropriate stuff at WalMart or Target. The trick is to avoid the “name brands” (Mary Kate and Ashley! ::shudder::slight_smile: and stick to the store-brand stuff. Plain cotton leggings and jeans, cotton polo shirts and turtle necks, etc. I find these things just fine at WalMart, and they’re super-inexpensive.

I’ll second that! I would have loved to have put casual sun dresses on my youngest this past summer, but there were none to be found!

8

I saw a kid this morning (probably about 10-12) wearing high-heeled boots. It made her walk like a woman is forced to walk in high-heels.

It made me think about this subject - the fast-tracking of kids into adulthood. But It really isn’t worth worrying about for me… It’s just a pair of shoes and kids wear what kids want to wear. They have very clear ideas of what they want at that age even if what they want carries non-obvious conotations* for us adults. They don’t for the kids.

*ETA: Our experienced adult brain attach meanings to things that those kids probably don’t. To the kid it’s just grown-up clothing, and kids like to pretend to be grown-ups. So I guess we are just letting kids be kids.

9

How do you know they were eleven? It was dark, and you were shooting by on your bicycle.

10

He said ‘about’. Your question is pedantic.

11

I do not believe “pedantic” means what you think it means.

If what you meant to say was that my question was irrelevant or picky, it wasn’t. It’s a perfectly relevant and important question. The OP provided no other evidence that young children dress provocatively except this one observation, as well as the usual “Kids these days are stupid” assertion that is standard boilerplate for these discussions. So the age of the children observed is extremely relevant. There’s not a lot of difference in the behaviour you would expect from, say, an 11-year-old and a 12-year-old, but there is if they were 16 instead of 11, which they may have been.

People often have a tendency to underestimate the age of people younger than themselves, and the further they are past their own childhoods the more pronounced the tendency gets.

12

No, I know what pedantic means. My point was if the OP thinks they are about 11, then it’s unlikely they are 16. They are probably somewhere between 10 and 12.

So perhaps I misunderstood the meaning of your reply. But not the meaning of ‘pedantic’. I assumed you were nit-picking about the OP being able to guess the age of a person by appearance alone. I felt that if the OP guessed the kids were 11 then the kids were probably 11 or 10 or 12… (but probably not 13, 14, 15, or 16)

13

This is satire, right?

Styling hair-my mother used to set my hair with curlers and tie it up with a ribbon. That should be illegal?
Jewelry too? So the little locket and my birthstone ring-both gifts from my godmother-would be illegal? What about watches?

Or hey, what about my medic alert bracelet?

I also LOVED to play dress-up with my mom’s old clothes and shoes and jewelry. In fact, I used to wear them over my clothes most of the time-especially this one long blue nightgown.
(BTW, manufactors already suggest that hair dye should NOT be used on children)
You do realize that this would only make the above forbidden fruit, and more enticing to children?

14

http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=79744&in_page_id=34

15

I know, let’s make kiddy fiddling illegal - that would make it go away completely :dubious:

16

I cut their heads off and then counted the rings.
What do you think?
How do you assess peoples ages?
As to the darkness we have a modern invention over here called streetlights.
And as to shooting past on my bike,I may be a budding geriatric contender for the Tour De France but I have yet to break the Light Speed barrier so there was nothing to hinder my vision.
I have driven cars at speeds WELL into double figures(At over 40mph on occassions! )and have still been able to see things,isn’t that amazing!

To answer the points made by others about making it illegal for children to dress up like teenage women in public places I still cant see a problem with this.
If the kids want to play dress up at home then no problem.

There is absaloutly no sensible reason that I can think of for children to dress like sexually provocative adults anyplace anytime.

17

Make them wear school uniforms all evening? How does that work?

As for making adult attire illegal, how are you going to even set about defining it? And who are you going to punish, the kids or the parents?

18

Before the age of treating children as mature individuals we wore school uniforms during the day and changed in the evening.

But getting changed did not mean that we(OR our parents felt that we)felt compelled to dress up in the lastest adult fashions or to act as though we had active sex lives(with other people I mean :slight_smile: )
Or had to go through with the pretence of “Relationships”,or sexual pressuring from other children (Some of whom at least probably dont want to but are going through the motions for peer status),jealouslies and break ups and so on.

As to my definition of “Adult” clothing I think that it would be fairer to say that I disapprove of clothing and other items whos main purpose is to enhance the sexual desirability of the child.
Figure hugging clothes,lowcut tops,short skirts etc.should have no place in a childs wardrobe .

If elaborate hairstyles,makeup and jewellery were banned for kids across the board then there would be no peer pressure for any of them to want to wear/have such fashion accessories.
I’m sorry,maybe I’m becoming one of the old fogies that I’ve always hated,but my gut reaction to seeing an 11 year old child with dyed “Big Hair” and wearing makeup and the rest is that it really isn’t very healthy .

19

You’re definitely becoming a fogey. Not that tarted up eleven year olds are a good thing, but seriously… you want to enact legislation requiring people comply with your sartorial standards? Seriously? I’m sorry, and you are…? Oh, nobody? Not even one of the Fug Girls? Okay, just checking.

20

You’re definitely becoming a fogey. Not that tarted up eleven year olds are a good thing, but seriously… you want to enact legislation requiring people comply with your sartorial standards? Seriously? I’m sorry, and you are…? Oh, nobody? Not even one of the Fug Girls? Okay, just checking.