6358 week 6 blog assignment

Nowadays, children are surrounded and exposed to the environment full of sex and sexuality. Children start to encounter these ideas at younger ages, and they haven’t had the ability to understand or deal with them (Levin, D. E., & Kilbourne, J. ,2009). According to the book “So sexy so soon” by Levin and Kilbourne, children are too young to understand the meaning, but they have always been curious about sex and sexuality, and if parents and schools can provide them with honest and age-appropriate information, it would be good for their understanding of the topic and their development (2009). However, what children are being exposed in the environment teaches them they should be beautiful, thin, hot, and sexy, and these are not the ways children should understand sexualization.

When walking in the shopping mall and in the stores, there are full of posters and advertisements with beautiful, hot and sexy ladies. The music in the mall is completely not suitable for young children to listen to, but it is so loud that everyone will have to listen to it. When seeing girls or ladies being tall, thin, and wearing sexy clothes, I have heard people complimenting them “so beautiful”, “look at that girl, you will never be as tall and thin as she is”, and so on. This information sends out messages that will have wrong definition to children about sex and sexualization. Children should not be given the ideas about “being thin and sexy is beautiful”, and they will get the wrong messages about sex and learn the inappropriate knowledge. As early childhood professional, we should always remind ourselves and the parents, to have developmentally and age appropriate books and music for young children. When they have concerns about their body parts and are curious about the topic, we need to deliver the right and proper messages, so that they do not learn negative information about the topic. We cannot control what the environment shows the children and what children learn from people other than their parents and schools, but we can at least minimize the negative impact on children when we choose to address the concerns in the appropriate way.

Reference

Levin, D. E., & Kilbourne, J. (2009). [Introduction]. So sexy so soon: The new sexualized childhood and what parents can do to protect their kids (pp. 1-8). New