Visualize your child sitting at a table. On the floor around her are thousands of one inch by one inch blocks and each block represents some sort of sexualized message. Perhaps it’s something sexual that she hears from a friend; or some sexual image or content on TV, or on an advertisement. It could be any type of message that has some sexual reference, whether it is fairly innocent and benign or explicit and incomprehensible. But every block represents some sexual message your daughter or son could encounter on any given day.
The first time your child is exposed to one of these sexualized messages, a block is placed on the table in front of her. With her second exposure to a sexualized message, another block is placed on the table next to the first block. With a third exposure a block is placed next to the second, and so on until the row is, let’s say, eighteen inches long. With the next exposure, a block is placed on top of the first block in the first row. This continues with each exposure to a sexualized message. With eighteen more blocks in place, a third row begins. A wall of blocks begins to form.
Got the picture? Now imagine how high the wall would be after just one day. How many sexualized messages--blocks--would be on the table in front of your child? Obviously, the older your child the higher the wall is likely to be, simply because we would expect an older child to have more varied experiences and hence more exposures to sexual messages. So how high would you expect the wall to be after a week? How about a month? Six months? A year? Ten years? If I were a betting man I’d bet that the wall of sexualized messages that your child has been exposed to has disappeared way up into the sky, well out of our sight. So think about this: by the time your child begins to enter puberty he or she has probably been exposed to thousands, if not tens of thousands of sexualized messages. And how many of these sexualized messages will be problematic, not representative of your values system? How many of them will portray women as sexual objects and men as hunters, lusting for sex? How many of them will be heterosexist and homophobic? How many of them will portray sexual intimacy and behavior without any sense of responsibility? How many of them will portray sex as something we can all engage in without having to be in love? How many of them are incomprehensible and just outright confusing to your young child? How many of them come from sources that you would have a problem with?
All this has got to send a little shiver down your spine right? And what will that wall of sexualized messages look like after your child has entered puberty and his or her sexual feelings and desires start being actualized, and peers begin to have more influence on your child than ever before? How high will it be then? And there your child sits, with a gigantic wall of sexualized messages staring her or him in the face. Our job as parents is to help our children make sense of that wall.
