Prostitots

You know what i'm talking about. Those little tween girls (though i've seen them as young as four years old) who wear skin-tight camisoles with flouncy mini-skirts. The girls who walk around in groups of 3-6, wearing booty shorts with words on their asses.

Prostitots: little whores in training.

When did little girls stop wearing awkward overall/dress things (jumpers? is that what they were called?) with t-shirts underneath? When did it become okay for a fourteen-year-old to sport multiple piercings and highlights? When did children become hyper-sexualized?

I read somewhere once that teenagers are a fairly recent phenomenon created by cultural shifts. It used to be that you were either a child or an adult. Then, suddenly, there was this whole new category: young people who wore their own fashions and listened to their own music and used their own slang. Teenagers, who still needed to ask Mom and Dad's permission to borrow the car or go out with friends or buy things, but disdained the company of "kids". They were their own sub-category of humanity, and they were here to stay.

But lately, it seems to me that we are moving back into two categories. Childhood seems to be disappearing. Even baby shoes, absurdly cute in their tininess, are no longer available only in simple primary colors. Now you can get baby Converse sneakers, skull-emblazoned slip-ons, and even shiny silver baby Uggs. I know adults who shop in the kid's department, not because they have childish taste in clothing, but because children's clothes look like what adults are wearing.

I remember wearing some truly hideous clothes as a child and LOVING them. I remember long-sleeved shirts with ruffled hems, stirrup-pants, and a hot pink nightgown decorated with rainbow colored envelopes. I remember a bowl cut, disastrous bangs, and hair that reached all the way to my (decently covered by loose-fitting, high-waisted jeans) behind.

I also remember being thirteen, having my first job, and being able for the first time to buy my own clothes. I remember my first-ever pair of hip-hugger jeans and how proud i was that i had picked them out and paid for them all on my own. I remember plucking my own eyebrows for the first time, picking out my own haircut, and learning to put on makeup.

These were all important developmental moments for me. These days, moments like that happen almost as soon as a child is able to walk. Sometimes before, when a parent thinks that her daughter is cute in a mini-skirt.

She's not cute. She's horrifying.

Let your kids be kids. Because when you don't, we end up with twenty-two year old women who want to wear Disney princess wedding gowns and can't leave the house unless something they are wearing sparkles. And that is almost as embarrassing to see as a fourteen-year-old with a "My Boyfriend Thinks I'm Studying" t-shirt.