Why an open letter to Target has received over 50,000 likes on Facebook

Issues that my daughter has been exposed to over the last two weeks: ‘getting trashed’, oral sex memes on Facebook, teen suicide (one threatened, one achieved), cyber bullying, extreme dieting and self-harm.  Hardly a day passes that I don’t scoop my jaw off the ground and cobble together impromptu parental guidance on the teen pressure de jour, and it’s only just begun. 

She’s thirteen.  An A-grade student who hasn’t yet put a foot too wildly wrong, according to my incessant snooping through her recently-acquired Facebook account (with her knowledge) so that I can toss her a life raft before she drowns.

Meanwhile, Port Macquarie mum Ana Amini has written an outraged comment on Target’s Facebook page urging the company to ‘make a range of clothing for girls 7-14 years that doesn’t make them look like tramps’.   As I write this, the ‘open letter’ has received over 52,000 ‘likes’ and nearly 3,000 comments. 

I asked the recently-appointed ‘online-fashion shopping guru of Year 8’ why they’re all shopping online and she looked at me like I came down in the last shower: ‘Have you seen what’s in the shops, Mum?  It’s all crap!’

If I feel jipped that my teen is being forced to grow up too fast, I can only imagine how parents of seven-year-olds might feel – rummaging fruitlessly through racks of ‘short’ shorts, low-cut tops and ‘grunge clothing’ – searching for something ‘nice’.

My eleven-year-old was in a regional schools concert recently, during which one high school performed a routine inspired by the movie Chicago to the song ‘He had it comin’, complete with simulated sex, drunkenness, stabbing ‘twenty times with a knife’ and a liberal assortment of profane lyrics. 

The dress-rehearsal audience was aged five years and up – the vast majority of them in primary school.  After parental complaints, the item was modified for the second performance and the sex scene removed – alas, not before a heap of kindergarten kids were exposed to it and asking about condoms.

This is the same daughter who emerged from a sleepover party, terrified by the horror flick, The Grudge, and having seen Knocked Up.  At ten.

I’m fighting an age-old urge to lock my kids up and keep them safe, but that would be doing them a disservice.  They need equipping for battle, not retreating from it.  As I stand on the sidelines of the gauntlet that is modern young adulthood - my heart in my mouth, hoping I’ve done enough - I’m yearning for the innocence of the last few years.  It’s being been ripped out from under our kids, far too young. 

A friend was recently horrified when the five-year-old daughter of her friend began gyrating suggestively to a Lady GaGa song, only to have the mother burst into applause and say to my friend, ‘Do you like it?  I helped her with the choreography!’

Childhood has been compressed, largely by the speed of technology and also by a growing desensitisation in adults and children to sexualisation in the media. There are now precious few years for little girls to cram into their lives the sugar and spice – before the tsunami of pressure hits them around middle-primary school.  

I was accused by my daughter of ‘caring too much’ when I asked her to ‘unlike’ an image on Facebook.  ‘Nobody cares, Mum!’ she explained, with a good eye-roll.

Parents like Ana Amini and the 52,000+ who appreciate her stance do care and it’s only by speaking up that we can have any hope of pushing the boundaries of childhood back out to a safer distance.  Our kids need more time to ‘grow up’ and ‘skill up’ before encountering much bigger challenges than we ever had to face at their age.

Nobody’s going to shift those boundaries but us.