Mummy, what's sex? Parents must answer honestly

By Vivien Leue Aug 25, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Hamburg - Skin-tight T-shirts, figure-hugging jeans, miniskirts and thigh boots - even very young girls can now dress as sexily as adult women. For boys too there are tight modern jeans and shirts that turn 3-year-olds into their macho or cool older counterparts.

'We are observing the phenomenon that children are now being dressed like adults,' says German sex educationist Kathrin Hettler. US psychologists especially are sounding the alarm, saying that children are being confronted with sexual signals too early in their young lives.

In their book So Sexy So Soon, Diane K Levin and Jean Kilbourne write that the constant flow of sexual content is changing children's behaviour. These children are learning at an early stage - too early - that their status in society is dependent on their sexual attractiveness.

In Europe, the issues are seen as less dramatic, even though public displays of sexuality and the sexualisation of children have increased, largely under the influence of the media, Hettler says.

But when parents react in an appropriate way, children know how to deal with it. 'It is important for parents not to remain silent,' says Silja Matthiesen, an academic from the Institute for Sex Research and Forensic Psychiatry in Hamburg.

'When children ask why that man is lying on top of the woman, this is not automatically a bad thing,' she says. Children need to be introduced to the theme in an unforced way and to learn that physicality and sexuality are something normal, beautiful and completely natural. 'Sex education should be an ongoing thing,' Matthiesen believes.

'If parents remain silent at this point, children get their information elsewhere,' Hettler says, and this often leads to their acquiring the 'wrong' information and develop an uncertain attitude towards sex issues.

However, adults should not confuse childlike interest and games with sexuality. 'When children paint their lips red or put on mummy's dress or high heels, they simply want to imitate adults,' says Doris Eberhardt, a sexologist based in Dortmund.

This kind of role play is far removed from the adult world of sexuality and not comparable, and for this reason adults should not react either strictly or by ignoring it, says Michael Hummert, a colleague of Eberhardt.

'These girls and boys also have to learn how it all works. It is not necessary to become concerned if and when children imitate various sexual roles and experiment with the corresponding clothes and makeup,' Hummert says.

What about more hard-core sexual signals, for example those transmitted by pornography? Modern youth are often referred to as the 'porn generation'.

But what does this actually mean for these young people and how should parents react? 'The most important thing for adults to say in this regard is that this is not sex, this is porn,' is Matthiesen's view.