Defending My Children

An ugly juxtaposition took place this morning: my little girl started preschool…and a news story aired about a 3-year-old beauty pageant contestant who was dressed – by her mother – like Julia Roberts’ hooker in “Pretty Woman”. I started my day sick to my stomach.

While we moms and dads bear enormous responsibility to protect and guide our children – a responsibility in which I believe this mother failed – we are also accountable as a society.  Corporately, we have gone beyond failure into victimizing and prostituting our children.

While we talk about protecting our kids, preserving their innocence, in practice we are doing something quite different. Little girls want to be like big girls. When grade school fashions resemble the sexier outfits of high school girls (whose styles mimic college-age women), small wonder that young girls end up wearing clothes that startle with their suggestiveness.

Our music videos, song lyrics, CD covers, TV ads and glamour magazines project an idealized and highly sexualized image of women and girls. The singers, actors and models our daughters look up to are often promoting unhealthy images – too thin, sexually promiscuous, physically modified, self-indulgent – that damage how our girls see themselves and others around them. What they see, hear and wear is devouring their innocence.

Our sons, who are more visually stimulated, are bombarded by images of scantily dressed women from toddlerhood. These photos, ads, magazine covers, TV shows and movie trailers are so ubiquitous, that we adults do not give them a second thought. How on earth can we expect our sons to look at women respectfully when they constantly see us in various states of undress? That too eats away at our boys’ innocence.

There is hope and help. My husband and I are reading a wonderful pair of books by Dr. Meg Meeker: “Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters” and “Boys Should Be Boys”. As a pediatrician, Dr. Meeker is sounding the alarm about how our culture is hurting our kids, and how we as parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles CAN have a profound and positive impact on our children. I would love to personally thank her someday.

Nevertheless, there are moments when I want to pack up our belongings and move to a Mennonite community.  Then I remember Christ’s admonition that we are to be “in the world, but not of the world”. Hard to do when we are bombarded by billboards, checkout-stand magazines, television, radio, in-store music, etc. We do have choices: restricting the shows our kids see, the music they listen to, dumping cable or satellite, limiting internet time, keeping the computer in a central place, staying on top of the magazines and books they read. Increasingly, I have come to greatly respect the parents who have chosen to get rid of TV completely.

So how do I find the balance of “in-not-of”, particularly where my children are concerned? The answer is not a simple one, but a process. Day by day, I need to keep my eyes open, my ears alert to recognize the dissonance between our culture and Christ. I need Him to define appropriate and inappropriate, helpful and hurtful, wholesome and degrading. I need God’s eyes and ears and sometimes His hands to protect my sweet, funny, little girl and my precocious, imaginative, little boy. After all, I answer to Father God for how I protect the children He has entrusted to me.