Editorial Commentary...

An online friend (follow her blog here) posted this to facebook and I just had to make sure everyone saw it here. Plus I wanted to comment a little bit on it myself...

He makes the points well enough himself. The clothes made available to little girls these days are nothing sort of atrocious. A friend and I will often walk past the girls section in Target (not exactly the most risque store around) and marvel at the clothing selection for girls and pre teens. Some of the jean skirts are barely long enough to cover my 18 month old, much less a long legged girl of 8 or 10. In my firm opinion, the only time "juicy" should be written on the backside of anyone's clothing is when they are still in a diaper cover because their bums literally are juicy! And as the author of the article states, manufacturers would not be making these clothes if they weren't selling or if they didn't think there was a chance that they would sell. What kind of a mother (or father) looks at some of these clothes and thinks...Oh my little girl would look so precious in this? Don't get me wrong, I am by no means an advocate for dressing your child like a prude, but there is cute and there is skank and the line between them is pretty clear and pretty well defined. This is also coming from a mom who realizes that it will be difficult for me to properly dress my child as her legs are already too long for a lot of 2T clothing (but she is not wide enough for 3T...does anyone know of a place that sells 2T-tall?!?). My job as a parent is not only to teach my child and meet her physical needs, but to make sure she is presentable to the world and to set clothing expectations for her to cover her body when need be (obviously she can expose more skin at the pool or beach). As he states, however, the girls are not driving themselves to the mall and buying these clothes with their own money. Somebody is buying the clothing for them which means one of two things. Either the parents are ok with their daughters dressing this way, which is unacceptable. Or they have so much power in the parent to child relationship that they have convinced their parents of their "need" for this clothing, which is unacceptable. And for anyone who feels like clothing is an appropriate expression of a child and their feelings (which is true and totally legitimate...to a point), do you really want your child expressing themselves with a push up bra, phrases written on their butt, and exposing parts of their body that few societies find appropriate on a normal basis? This is just another classic example of hypersexualization (ha- I'm making it into a word again) in our society. We force mothers to breastfeed in private, but encourage little girls to expose themselves to the world...this is wrong...

Just a little rant, any thoughts from the readers?