Diane E. Levin

I think this is an important book for parents and perhaps also teachers/caregivers to read. It is not at all intellectual, and therefore a quick and easy read, with some interesting points and insights.
As a teacher and grandparent of young children I speak often with parents about the influences of our culture on children. Although many of the parents I know are particularly cautious when it comes to their own children's exposure to mainstream media, this book points out the insidious ways that the influence is unavoidable.
I am particularly struck by the comments about how consumerism leads to objectification of people, and am trying to figure out a way to clarify and explain that point for a newsletter to parents.
Although the book gives some ideas for protecting children and helping parents and children navigate our sexualized culture more safely, there are no quick fixes. Important to remember that products marketed to children are designed to sell and make money, not to promote healthy development of children. Near the end, the authors point to other countries that have banned or dramatically restricted advertising aimed at children. hmmm... wouldn't that look different?
I ate lunch with a 5 year old boy this week who refused to eat his yogurt because the picture on the label was Dora, not Diego. Wow!… (altro)

As a father and a psychologist, the commercialization and sexualization of childhood that is subject of So Sexy, So Soon is readily apparent and of grave concern. Drs. Levin and Kilbourne do an excellent job of laying out the nature of the problem and providing some straightforward solutions to dealing with issues of sexuality (and mass media/commercialism).
Though I would highly recommend this work to anyone raising children in this day and age, a few caveats are in order. First, this book is not about sex education, but rather the precocious sexualization of children in our culture. In fact, the authors go to great pains to repeatedly “reassure” readers that they have no problem with sex and sexual development, but with the overly early exposure to sexuality. Unfortunately, the authors tend to dilute this message with tangents into other aspects of commercialization to an extent that the work becomes as much a polemic against consumer culture.
Second, there is a notable feminist bias in that colors the nature of the book. As is common in feminist psychology*, the authors perceive child development as purely a matter of nurture and socialization; there is, in other words, no acknowledgment of the gender differences that are inherent in children’s psychology and wants/needs. The presumption is that boys and girls would be psychologically and socially similar if not for the segregating effects of society. This bias colors the type of advice that is given. For example, a girl playing “dress up” with her Barbie dolls is somehow damaged, but the same child playing dress up herself with her mother’s close is not. Now the argument can be made (and the authors make it with regard to Bratz dolls) that Barbie dolls present a superficial understanding of beauty; however, the authors seem to skip over this as an issue for Barbie dolls in the desire to focus more on the fact that the Barbie doll is not as creative a toy as, say, play dough.
Another aspect of this bias comes into play with regard to boys. The authors claim that toys such as Spiderman, Batman, Star Wars, Transformers, somehow encourage violence and aggression. Again, the inherent bias focuses on one aspect of the toys which significantly ignores the broader message that superhero and science fiction toys give to boys about ethics and values of justice and empathy.
Of course, books on this topic are invariably written by feminist psychologists* and, as long as one recognizes the limited perspective such a filter provides, the works are important and useful. Of the number of books that have come out on this topic in recent years, So Sexy So Soon is probably among the better ones.

*As a note, I am not using feminist in the politically loaded sense, but rather in reference to a specific school of thought in psychology that interprets human behavior from that school of thought. Just as the psychoanalytic school of thought uses a particular lens, so does the feminist school of thought.
… (altro)