A preschooler repeats pop-song lyrics with S&M overtones. A mom finds her seven-year-old crying in the bathtub because she believes she’s “fat” and “not sexy” like other girls at school – she wants to go on a diet. A kindergartener asks at dinner, “What’s a blowjob?” and his ten-year-old sister shrieks and giggles knowingly. An eight-year-old boy confides in his dad that he saw Internet porn at a friend’s house… What is going on?! I asked Diane E. Levin, Ph.D., and Jean Kilbourne, Ed.D. co-authors of So Sexy So Soon.

Why are kids—and their parents—having to face all these “sexy” issues today, and when children are so young?

Diane Levin: There is all this effort to say we wouldn’t have any problem if parents just did their job, but society should be helping parents do their job, not making it harder and then blaming them when they can’t get it perfect…

Jean Kilbourne: It’s exhausting, it’s not fair, and ultimately there’s just no way, as an individual parent, you can take on the culture and win.

There is already too much mommy-guilt in the world, so I appreciate that point! Where does the blame belong?

DL: It’s all the marketing and corporate interests that are very much creating this environment in order to capture children’s attention and lure them into buying particular products…

JK: On a deeper level, it’s an attempt on the part of marketers to get kids, early on, to confuse sex with shopping, so that to be sexy is to wear the right jeans or the right perfume or to have the right stuff, which really has nothing to do with who you are. But if you believe that you are what you buy, then you’ll spend a lot of time and money shopping.

In the book, you mention this historic shift in the 80s, which made it easier for marketers to target kids. Can you talk about that?

DL: Television was deregulated, and TV became the way to market to young children. The whole show became a commercial, with many more gender divisions in marketing. The shows for girls were Care Bears, My Little Pony, and for boys it was He-Man, Transformers, and GI Joe. That gender division was done as a way to market products specifically to boys and girls at an age when they’re particularly vulnerable to gender stereotypes… The big muscles of He-Man and the sweetness and prettiness of My Little Pony, and focusing on appearance… It’s all just gotten more and more extreme in the years that have followed. The muscles have gotten bigger and the offerings for girls have gone from being pretty and sweet to increasingly sexualized, as in Bratz dolls.

How does this affect boys as well as girls?

DL: Boys are being taught you need to be tough, macho, and ready to fight… in order to be “a real male.” That makes it very hard to connect to people, to have relationships. Both boys and girls are being socialized to think of themselves, and each other, as objects. So, then sex becomes something that happens between objects, it’s not about affection and caring – that’s getting taken out of the equation.

How can parents help put that back in the equation?

DL: Having caring, connected relationships… that’s the most important foundation to start. Helping kids do creative, rich, imaginative play, not just imitating Disney princesses or Bratz dolls, or the karate chops of Power Rangers…

JK: Most important of all, we want our children to feel completely safe coming to us with whatever questions or concerns are on their minds. We may not get the answer “right,” we may stumble or blush… but the big message to convey—starting early on—is, “I’m glad you asked. You can always ask me about anything.”

So, you don’t recommend freaking out?

JK: As parents, I think we need to be easy on ourselves and recognize it’s pretty normal to freak out… My daughter, when she was 11, asked what oral sex was. I was stunned! She said, “I think I know what it is, but I just want to be sure.”
So I said, “Well, what do you think it is?”
She said, “I think it’s when you talk about it.”

[Laughing.] That’s sweet… What did you say to that?

JK: I said, “Yep! That’s it.” [Laughing.] And I was very tempted to just leave it at that, but I said, “Talking about sex is incredibly important, and you should never have sex with someone you can’t talk about it with, etcetera, etcetera.” (So I did some of that.) “But that’s really not what people mean when they say ‘oral sex,’” and I went on to—as briefly as possible—tell her what it was. Of course, she was totally grossed out, the way I was when I heard about French kissing at that age.

So often, we want to be able to just tell children the right answer, but hearing what the kids think is really important. We wrote So Sexy So Soon to encourage just lots and lots of conversations because the research is clear that kids who have this in their lives are just better off.

DL: We believe that caring adults have a more important role to play now than ever.