Is Childhood Disappearing?
2012
Brendan Dolman
Sociology, Unit 3
5/1/2012

Abstract
This is a report to look at the social construct of Childhood and whether it is disappearing. This report explores the history of childhood and current socio cultural influences on modern day childhood.

Is Childhood disappearing?

Introduction I am interested in this subject area because childhood is a social construct which seems to be diminishing from society. This is of particular interest to me because childhood as we know it has only been about for the last century but now it seems that it is once again diminishing from society. I say this because when looking at childhood from 50 years ago and comparing it to childhood today there is a huge difference. Today toys seem to be targeted at children of ages 1-10 years old but not for children above that age (Manhattan Institute for Policy Research). Children seem to be pushed into the spotlight of adult activities such as the fashion and glamour world in the case of beauty pageants (Daily Mail Online 2011). There also seems to be more of a focus on older children playing on computer consoles with violent games which depict realistic and gruesome actions. These computer games also depict real life situations such as the war in Afghanistan and give these older children the opportunity to play as a soldier in this scenario.

Content What is childhood? Childhood is not to be confused with being a child, it is a completely different idea altogether. In modern day society, childhood is a social construct which is not seen as a natural or biological stage of life, but as being created out of the idealism of socio-cultural values. This creation is shown in the way that children are taught to behave, how to dress, and how they should be treated appropriately. This being said there are also other factors that would exhibit the opposite, such as the sweatshops in the eastern continents and the way that children are also over protected in western society. (Sociology in Focus, 2006)

Cross cultural examples of Childhood The idea that childhood is a social construction is supported by cross cultural evidence from anthropological sources. Evidence to support these comes from research on the Pacific island of Tikopia, (Raymond Firth, 1963, Sociology in Focus) where children were found to be using sharp tools or fishing on the open sea. These children were not forced or told to do these tasks, but rather went about them when they felt that they would be able to complete the task sufficiently, not when adults thought they were competent or that it would be safe for the children to do so. This is a vast difference to that of the culture in the western world where children would not be allowed to handle sharp implements or fish without the supervision of an adult, much less before they were of a certain age and competence. In western culture it would be like letting a toddler play with a lit stick of dynamite. This again can be shown in the way that children are used as soldiers in Uganda, Sierra Leone amongst others (BBC News.co.uk). (See Appendix)

History of Childhood In the opinion of some sociologists, childhood has lived only a short life, only a century or so and now some sociologists would argue that it is on its way out again. Looking through history children were depicted in the same manner as adults. They would be out in the fields working the crops, or down the coal mines along with the adults. They were treated in much the same way as adults, if they had committed a crime they were punished in the same way, not given a shorter or more lenient sentence because of their age. Girls as young as 10 years old were used as prostitutes and many young boys were used in the underground culture as rent-boys. Childhood in the past consisted of nothing more than work, prostitution, death, illness and crime. There were no child protection agencies like the modern day Childline or NSPCC. Children were made to work and then they died. Life for children of this time quite literally meant that they went straight from the womb, to work for 30 years if they were lucky, then straight to the grave. Although there was no idea of childhood there was nothing to suggest that children were no less cared for or as loved as they are in modern society. (Sociology in Focus, 2006) Phillipe Aries (1962) suggests that childhood began to emerge in the late 16th century when the aristocracy and wealthy parents of children sent them off to school to be educated. This could be seen as an emergence, but when compared to the childhood of today we are able to see this was nothing more than a scheme for the wealthy to keep their money in their families by providing educated heirs to take on their estates. As the industrial revolution became widespread every child who was not involved in education was set to work, whether it be in the mines, mills, factories or in the farms of the countryside, no uneducated child was safe. (Sociology in Focus, 2006)

Childhood only began to surface in the 19th century, when education became a state requirement and children were sent to school rather than down the mines or under the machinery of the mills in factories. The children had now been separated from the adults and this was paramount for the full birth and development of childhood as we know it today. For years adults and children had worked side by side, children were used for the menial tasks which could not be fulfilled by adults but now children had been given their own legal status as a separate entity to that of their former peers, Adults. This enabled children to be able to further their own chances in later life meaning that they would have a greater chance of being able to leave the lower echelons of society and hopefully go on to better careers. (Sociology in Focus, 2006)

As time progressed there became people who specialised in children such as child psychologists, paediatricians, educationalists and people who taught parenting skills. Children began to revolutionise the world and childhood began to evolve. Children were becoming more important in the eyes of the law, adults, the state and most importantly in the eyes of their parents. Aries suggested that the world was obsessed with the sexual, physical and emotional/moral problems of childhood, and that children have special needs which are different to those of adults. Children have needs to be trained and taught to do things, because they do not have the inherent skills or abilities they may need later in life. As a result of these needs there is now an army of people who are there, ready and waiting to train and teach these children the skills for life. This is very different to that of the Middle Ages when children were used as slaves, workers, adult ‘companions’ and were seen as being unimportant. Nowadays they are seen as being the future of humanity and because of this there is a lot of responsibility placed on them. (Wikipedia.org)

When looking at childhood in the modern age there are normally two portrayals. One is of the angelic wholesome child who is innocent and pure, while the other is the child from hell, nasty, sinful and full of spite. These were pointed out by Wendy stainton Rogers (2001). In her opinion both images exist on the same plane and at the same time. She uses several examples such as the children from Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons which features children who are innocent, pure and charming. To counter this she also uses an example of children featured in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, where the children are barbaric and savage like. (Sociology in Focus, 2006)

These images would go to suggest that children are prone to act in particular ways and that there are a number of different attitudes towards children. The images greatly contrast with one image showing that children should be shielded from the reality of adulthood where everything is not pure and that the grass is not always greener on the other side of the hill. The other image showing that children who are left to become barbaric and savage like should be controlled and that they should be given discipline. When comparing these images of childhood it would go to suggest that the ways in which children are brought up and the ways in which they act can be attributed to the adults who bring them up.

Childhood ISDisappearing Nick Lee (2001) is off the opinion that with childhood being a social construction, created mainly in the 20th century, there has been a change towards the end of the century and into the start of the 21st century. He suggests that for most of the last century children and adults were seen as two different entities, but that status seems to be changing yet again. (Sociologyresources.co.uk)

As a result of the increasing rates of divorce and the adult relationship becoming more of a temporary affair, the stability and completion which adulthood used to provide is no more. Growing up used to be seen as working towards that stability by becoming more mature, but with this new instability created by the rates of divorce the prospect of growing up and being stable is rapidly fading. This is not helped either by the way in which the recession has hit society.

Careers are becoming a thing of the past, a relic in society, and they are no longer a long-term affair. Instead careers are being replaced by jobs, and people use them, and interchange them in much the same way as we as people find a pair of socks interchangeable. This is the same for relationship partners. Nothing is permanent anymore and every action that adults make is reflected by the children around them. Parents are often taught to teach their children in the manner of ‘lead by example’ but the example that parents seem to give to their children is that nothing is forever, and that change is always just round the corner.

When looking at the modern societal culture we can see that children are being pushed into adulthood earlier and earlier. Children of the past were used to an aspect of stability in their childhood, they were born, they would grow and experience life with the help and care of the adults around them. They were seen as being dependent completely on the adults in their life. The adults would provide warmth and comfort for them, clothe them when they needed clothes. Give them food when they needed feeding. Children were not responsible for themselves, they were left to grow up and learn about life from the experiences they gained in the environment around them. This has now changed as children are seen as people in their own right. (The Disappearance of Childhood, Neil Postman)

Children are becoming decreasingly dependent on the adults around them for comfort, and are becoming increasingly independent in the manner that they are beginning to create social circles earlier in life, they are growing up much quicker and this is apparent when looking at the economy and the market for children. Toymakers and toy brands no longer sell a wide range of toys to children much older than 8 or 9 years old. Children above that age are seen as not being interested with Lego or Barbie, but seen as wanting to play games on playstation or putting on make-up and going out with friends and this can be seen in the beauty pageants and parades of North America (see Appendix). Children are becoming more and more sexualised. There is evidence of children becoming sexualised as was shown by an article which showed a Matalan selling padded bras to pre-teen girls. (Daily Mail Online, 2011) (See Appendix).

It doesn’t end there, another store, Primark, abandoned plans to sell padded bikinis for girls aged 8-9 years old and Tesco was blasted in the press for selling heeled Disney Princess shoes to girls aged 3-4 years old. The reasoning behind this marketing scheme could be teenage idols such as that of Disney’s Hannah Montana who is constantly portrayed as wearing a lot of make-up and high-heeled shoes. The fact that the girl who portrays her, 18 year old Miley Cyrus, wears such provocative clothes and outfits in her own music videos and in her public appearances probably doesn’t do much to help matters either. (Telegraph.co.uk) (See Appendix)

Pre-teen boys are becoming more and more engrossed in brutal, violent games in the manner of computer consoles (See Appendix). Games like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Assassin’s Creed and others are all 18 rated games which portray and depict violent, often gruesome acts and yet these games are being played by children as young as 10 years old (netplaces.com). The effects of these games is that the children are able to see gruesome acts, which although are computer generated still have a large effect on their lives. These young boys are still very impressionable just like the girls who are wearing make-up and wearing provocative clothes. There is a large psychological effect on these young boys, they see that violence in right, yet they do not understand the circumstances that the games are portraying.

This situation is not helped either by the fact that although toymakers no longer target children above a certain age for toys, they do still make toys which enable these children to act out the scenes that they witness, either in the way that a Disney character is portrayed or in the way of being able to recreate a military skirmish. Toy manufacturers are beginning to make doll heads to practice hair and make-up, and this is not helped by the Bratz Franchise (see appendix) which portrays teen girls who wear short skirts. Young girls see this franchise as an aspiration model and though the franchise, like the Disney franchise, is American, it is shown on British television and the toys are sold in British shops. (Canadianfamily.ca) (See Appendix)

Childhood is NOT Disappearing In contrast to his own opinions that childhood is disappearing because of the instabilities caused by modern adulthood, Nick Lee (2001) also gives the view that Childhood is becoming more complex and equivocal in the sense that although they have a dependency on the adults around them, they are able to make their own decisions. As outlined by Nick lee, children are the marketing power of the modern age, they influence the market and ultimately decide what’s “cool” and what is not. This being said although they control the market, they still rely on the spending power of their parents and the adults in their lives. This goes to suggest that although they no longer rely on the social comfort provided by parents and caregivers, they still rely on them for the materialistic aspect of their lives which would suggest that although childhood is disappearing, it isn’t at the same time. (Sociology in Focus, 2006)

Another aspect that childhood is not disappearing could be the way that people value children. Children are viewed as being the future and adults put so much protection around that view that children are almost in a bubble. In modern day society children are protected from every possible threat, and although sometimes these protective measures do not always work, the majority of them do. Companies and charities like NSPCC, ChildLine amongst others, do so much work to protect the innocence of children keep the world safe for them. These charities are there to help children who are in need of protection, who may need someone to talk to and if necessary remove them from a situation where they are unsafe and place them into a situation that is better for them. Laws have been created as protective measures for children and there is even an increase in the resources allocated to find people who may want to harm children or destroy their lives and the lives of the people who love them, people such as paedophiles and “child predators”.

Conclusion To conclude, there is evidence of both the disappearance of childhood and childhood not disappearing. As stated above childhood has only been in existence for about 100 years and it is certainly changing with every period of social evolution. (Chronicle.com) As a result of this constant state of change, it is my own opinion that some sociologists believe that childhood is disappearing because their own perceptions of childhood have not changed at the same time. Although the state of childhood is changing so regularly, there are still the people who think that it is not disappearing, merely evolving and becoming more and more complex. This is shown in modern social culture where children’s fashions are beginning to mimic the fashions of the adults, but the children are dependent upon the adults in their lives to provide for them with food, these similar clothes, toys and anything else they may require. This being said it is impossible to say whether childhood really is disappearing or whether it is just evolving to the point that some people are no longer able to perceive it.

Refernces and Bibliography
Kay S. Hymowitz. (1999). Cheated out of Childhood. Available: http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/_parents-cheated_out_of_childh.htm. Last accessed 30th Apr 2012.

Anon. (23 Jun 2011). The moment nine-year-old girl is forced to endure agony of eyebrow waxing for child beauty pageant. Available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2007274/Child-beauty-pageants-9-year-old-girl-forced-endure-eyebrow-waxing.html. Last accessed 30 Apr 2012.

Haralambos, M; 2006 Sociology in Focus for AS Level; Causeway Press, Ormskirk

Haralambos, M; 2006 Sociology in Focus for AS Level; Causeway Press, Ormskirk

Linda Sonner Phd. (2011). The Disappearance of Childhood. Available: http://www.netplaces.com/tweens/preserving-the-innocents/the-disappearance-of-childhood.htm. Last accessed 3rd May 2012

Anon. (2011). Fury as Matalan sells padded bras to EIGHT-YEAR-OLD girls . Available: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1366012/Fury-Matalan-sells-padded-bras-pre-teen-girls.html. Last accessed 3rd May 2012.

Anon. (2009). Disney star Miley Cyrus criticised over provocative photo shoot. Available: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/celebritynews/5629130/Disney-star-Miley-Cyrus-criticised-over-provocative-photo-shoot.html. Last accessed 3rd May 2012.

Alicia. (2009). Dolls Gone Wild: Are Bratz Too Provocative? . Available: http://www.canadianfamily.ca/2009/04/dolls-gone-wild-are-bratz-too-provocative/. Last accessed 3rd May 2012.

Melvin Konner. (2010). How Childhood Has Evolved. Available: http://chronicle.com/article/How-Childhood-Has-Evolved/65401/. Last accessed 3rd May 2012

Appendix
Cheated out of childhood
October 1999 Vol.74, no.10
By Kay S. Hymowitz
The years and between 8-12 used to be the age of innocence. Now, as our kids rush headlong into a premature adolescence, childhood itself is an endanqered species.
Last year, my youngest child morphed from child to teenager. Down came the posters of adorable puppies and the drawings from art class; up went the airbrushed face of Matt Damon. Paula Cole CDs and teen fan magazines featuring glowering rock'n' roll hunks suddenly appeared on her bedside table. As summer approached and younger children skipped past our house on their way to the park, Anna donned her new uniform—a tank top and denim cutoffs—and swigged bottled water while whispering to her friends on the cell phone.
The last rites of her childhood came when she pulled a sheet over her years-inthemaking American Girl doll collection, now dead to the world.
So what's new in this dogbitesman story? Well, when all this was happening, my daughter was 10 years old and in the fourth grade.
Parents who remember their own teenybopper infatuations with David Cassidy or Donny Osmond might be inclined to shrug and say, "That's how it's always been." But this is something altogether different. Having already sprinted through early childhood, today's "tweens" (the marketers' term of choice for 8- to 12-yearolds, like Anna) are also catapulting over the stage once called preadolescence. As tween styles, attitudes, and, alas, behavior increasingly mimic those of teenagers, childhood as we once defined it is evaporating before our eyes.
Indeed, tweens avoid even the suggestion that they are children, instead cultivating an image of knowing maturity. According to marketing surveys of children's attitudes, by the time kids are 12, they routinely use the adjectives flirtatious, sexy, trendy, and cool to describe themselves. Furthermore, notes Bruce Friend, senior vicepresident of Nickelodeon/MTV networks' international research and planning, by age 11, many children in Nickelodeon's research groups say they do not want to be called children at all.
"The biggest trend we've seen recently is teenlike preteen behavior," says Friend. "The 12 to 14yearolds of yesterday are the 10 to 12yearolds of today." This is a lesson the nation's toy makers have taken to heart. Thirty years ago, according to the Toy Manufacturers of America, they targeted their products to children from infancy to 14 years; today, they do not expect to sell toys to anyone over the age of 10.
The signs of this precocity are everywhere, as clothing stores such as the Wet Seal chain sprout up in malls across America and catalog companies such as Delia's market cool black minidresses to tween girls. Cosmetics companies have introduced tween lines, complete with hair mascara in "edgy" neon colors and body lotions with names like Vanilla Vibe and Follow Me Boy. Sixthgrade teachers complain that the 11yearold girls in their classes often come to school in full makeup, with streaked hair, platform shoes, and midriffrevealing shirts.
And this tween fashion scene is by no means limited to girls. A steadily growing number of boys have traded in their baseball cards for hair mousse and baggy jeans. Starter jackets emblazoned with the logo of a favorite sports team and costing as much as $200 are all but obligatory in many fourth and fifth grades; in others, $40 Abercrombie & Fitch Tshirts are the newest status symbol. Barbara Canham, a mother of two from Denver, was shocked when her 8yearold son began affecting a street style, wearing baggy pants, turning his baseball cap backward, using hiphop lingo, and disappearing into his bedroom for hours to listen to 'N Sync CDs.
The slick pseudosophistication of tween movies is another index of the erosion of childhood. Tweens snub youthful fare (Anna rejects any film rated G or PG because "that means it's for babies") and flock to such teen sex comedies as Can't Hardly Wait (PG13). Scream, the Rrated horror film about a serial killer who stalks young women, is a favorite on the tweens slumberparty circuit—although, as Beth Schrooten, of Katy, Texas, discovered after her 10yearold daughter saw it at a friend's house, the film's graphic sadism may bring out a child's true age. "She wanted to watch because other kids said it was cool," says Schrooten. "But then she couldn't sleep the next night." This past summer's megahit Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (PG13) had 9 and 10yearolds around the country quoting smirky double entendres.
Cultural Conspiracy
If the tween phenomenon were merely a matter of fashions and fads, it might not be cause for much alarm. But there is disturbing evidence that tweens are shedding not only the goodygoody image of childhood but its substance as well. Eating disorders, depression, acts of malice and violence, and suicide (which has doubled for the 10 to 14year age group since 1980) are all growing among early adolescents and preadolescents. Tellingly, many of the copycat threats that followed in the wake of the Littleton, Colorado, massacre occurred not in high schools but in middle schools.
Sexual activity is also on the rise. Between 1988 and 1995, the proportion of girls who reported having sex before 15 rose from 11 percent to 19 percent. (For boys, the number remained stable, at 21 percent.) This statistic means that approximately one in five middleschool kids is sexually active—and it doesn't even include the muchtalkedabout predilection among middleschoolers for oral sex.
To some extent, this desire to adopt the customs of the next age group up is nothing new. Young kids have always emulated their teenage babysitters and highschool sports stars. But what's different about today is that the entire society seems to be a coconspirator. In the past, our culture revered childhood, and grownups collectively endeavored to preserve it as a time of innocence. Today, it seems as if everyone is saying, "Go aheadrace through childhood. And the faster the better."
Left to Their Own Devices
The most obvious culprit, of course, is the media. Thanks to roundtheclock television programming, videos, movies, video and computer games, and the Internet, children are exposed to ever more adult material at ever younger ages. Even "family TV shows" feature countless examples of tart-tongued, worldweary youngsters who are in fact much too smart to be kids (and who are invariably smarter than the dimwitted adults around them)—from Rugrats' 3yearold Angelica to The Simpsons' 10yearold Bart.
But we parents also play a big role in our children's diminishing childhoods—mainly by not playing a bigenough role in their lives. A fact usually overlooked in the furor over child care is that, regardless of the solution arrived at, younger kids have continuous adult attention, whether in the form of sitters, teachers, or daycare workers. But at around age 8 or 9, as they exhibit growing competence, kids are often left alone for several hours a day. "This is exactly the age when more kids are left to their own devices," agrees Ron Taffel, Ph.D., a Parents contributing editor and author of Nurturing Good Children Now (St. Martin's Press, 1999). "Parents who’ve been at home find this a good time to go back to work." And longtime working parents, after years of juggling schedules and panicking over lastminute sore throats, sigh in relief as they post a list of emergency numbers on the refrigerator and hand over the house keys. As Dr. Taffel puts it, "Practical necessity supports the philosophy that 'this is good for my child.’”
The problem is that, as many teachers attest, kids are lonely. One New York City middleschool principal told me that she frequently has to shoo kids out of the building when afterschool activities end, at 6:00 p.m. "They don't want to go home," she says. "There's no one there."
What this parental absence means is that peer influence moves in to fill the void. Educators report that cliques are taking firm hold earlier than ever. Unlike ordinary friendships, cliques are often harsh and powerful mechanisms for making kids conform to codes of dress and behavior that have been absorbed from the media. Patricia A. Adler, the author, with Peter Adler, of Peer Power: Preadolescent Culture and Identity (Rutgers University Press, 1998), found that by late elementary school, boys' popularity depends on "macho coolness and toughness." Girls are popular, says Adler, if they are pretty, "have cool clothes and cool possessions—the fancy car, the big house." And, adds Adler, popularity increases in direct proportion to a child's detachment from adults.
To make matters worse, parents are often reluctant to take a stand against these trends. Unsure about what other kids are up to or what is really going on at school, many parents end up accepting their children's judgment. Others are unwilling to squander what little time they have with their kids on battles about clothing or movies. "When you're working a lot, there's less time to form a close relationship, so you do whatever you can to make it work," says Jennifer Hammerstein, of South Salem, New York. "You worry that your child won't like you. You give in a lot." And let's face it: Stressedout parents often welcome signs that their kids are maturing, even when those signs take the form of PG13 movies and metallic lip gloss.
It's a vicious circle. Rather than having any single cause, this widespread curtailment of youthful innocence can be attributed to a whole host of them, each reinforcing the other. With less time for family life, 8 to 12yearolds look to their peers for companionship and behavioral cues. The peer group in turn looks to the media. And the media spy a robust new market group that revels in being treated as savvy, independentfrom-adults consumers. In the meantime, parents, disinclined to fight either of these forces, watch helplessly as their kids gallop through what, once upon a time, were the prime years of childhood.
©1999 Parents
The moment nine-year-old girl is forced to endure agony of eyebrow waxing for child beauty pageant

A nine-year-old girl is made to have her eyebrows waxed in the name of beauty as mothers push their daughters to ever greater extremes in the competitive world of child pageants.
Chloe, nine, from Forney in Texas, can be seen screwing her face up in shock and pain as she undergoes the procedure in a professional salon in preparation for a contest.
While the child braces herself to be plucked and preened, her mother Jamie hovers over her and nods approvingly.

Stinging: Nine-year-old Chloe screws up her face as a beautician prepares to wax her eyebrows
The event appeared on television last night, on the latest episode of hit reality show Toddlers and Tiaras.
Jamie, who works full time in beauty pageants, explained that she was giving her daughter a makeover to stand a better chance of taking home a crown from a pageant in Oklahoma.
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In an attempt to justify her decision to wax the youngster's brows, Jamie told the cameras: 'A little bit of pain to win a better title? She'll take it all day long.'
She added: 'If it would come down to facial beauty alone, she doesn't have that particular look that a lot of judges are looking for.

In the pursuit of beauty: Nine-year-old Chloe, left, is transformed, right, by treatments including hair dye, eyebrow waxing and tooth veneers
'She does have brown eyes with the dirty blonde hair. It doesn't stand out like a beautiful red-head or a blonde-haired, blue-eyed child.'
Before her eyebrows were waxed, Chloe's wispy blonde hair was coated in highlights by a stylist. The girl was pictured sitting with her mother reading celebrity magazines as the the bleach took effect.
Then beautician Nataya Newsom stepped in.
As the first wax strip is ripped from the child's brow she looks shocked and clutches her inflamed eyes.
Chloe said afterwards: 'It was pretty bad.'
Jamie is also seen providing her daughter with temporary veneers for her teeth, to hide what she refers to as a 'jack-o-lantern' smile.

In agony: Chloe clutches her inflamed face after having her eyebrows waxed at the salon in Texas

Like mother, like daughter: Chloe and her mother Jamie read celebrity magazines while they wait for the nine-year-old's highlights to take
She said: 'I call her my little jack-o-lantern because right now some teeth are all the way down, some aren't, some are completely missing.
'Having your teeth look good does of course make a difference on stage.'
Chloe added: 'I like wearing my flipper so I don't look like a jack-o-lantern. I'm not going to be a jack-o-lantern for Halloween because jack-o-lanterns are fat.'
In other disturbing footage from the series, one mother, Elicia, is filmed attempting to spray tan her four-year-old daughter, Hallee, in preparation for the Oklahoma pageant.
The child, from Siloam Springs in Arkansas, is seen wailing as she stands in the bath and braces herself for the treatment.

Devoted: Chloe's mother Jamie works full-time in child beauty pageants and does everything she can to make her daughter win

Growing up fast: Chloe quickly learns why her mother gives her veneers when she competes in child beauty pageants
She screams: 'Mama, it's going to be cold, I don't like to be tanned.'
Unable to persuade her daughter to comply, Elicia said: 'She is four and her mood will change at the drop of a hat. If she doesn't want to get tanned then we're not going to.'
Hallee, who was dressed as Little Bo Peep for the pageant, went on to take home the prize for best costume.
Chloe was crowned the 'Ultimate Grand Supreme' winner for her polished performance and skimpy Daisy Duke-inspired outfit.

AK-47: the Sierra Leone child soldier | Like this boy, Sangeba was still a child when he fought in the war |
All this week, BBC World Service's The World Today programme is looking at the stories behind one of the world's most iconic weapons, the AK-47. Throughout the week we will be speaking to the people who trade in it, the people who carry it, and the people whose lives have been destroyed by it.CHILD SOLDIER, SIERRA LEONEIn Africa up to 100,000 children are thought to have been involved in armed conflict last year. The AK-47 is the weapon of choice for child soldiers, as it is light and easy to use but can discharge 600 rounds per minute. Sierra Leone is a country notorious for its use of child soldiers in its 10-year civil war. Both the government and rebels recruited children. Sangeba was recruited by the rebelsI was a small boy, 12 years old, and I was going to school when the rebels captured me and a lot of my friends. They caught my mother and father, and then killed my father in my presence. Then they went with us to the bush to go and train how to fight. | AK-47 STORIES Monday: Colombian guerrilla |
We were called the Small Boys' Unit (SBU). They sent us to go and loot. They trained us how to load and fire guns including the AK-47. Whether attacking the government forces or civilian towns, we would take the guns. Normally they sent us ahead to go and spy on a place, and then attacked it later. Most of those guns they used were AK-47 because the AK-47 is the most popular gun. Once they took us to a jungle in Eastern Province, and I saw a lot of guns, mostly AK47s, and some heavy artillery - G3, FN [both rifles] and RPG [rocket-propelled grenades], you know. I panicked because I had never seen such an amount of weapons before. | THE AK-47 Stands for Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947Designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov while wounded in hospital - though he later said he wished he invented the lawnmower insteadProduced in greater numbers than any other 20th-Century assault rifleFires 600 rounds a minuteEstimated 70-100m in the worldThe AK47 has spawned many derivatives, such as the Chinese-manufactured Type 56 AK-47: Iconic weapon |
Our commanders explained to us that they got them from the Liberians, some said they got them from soldiers they killed, and from Guinea. Our commanders instructed us to fight to defend ourselves. So I was handling my AK-47 with this in mind. I cannot remember how many people I killed. I was not really intending to do so but for the fact that I was holding this weapon to defend myself. If you don't fight to kill, whether anybody's coming, whether enemy or friend, if they kill you, they or your commander will leave your body there and go. That is why I defended myself. I killed a lot of people. I feel so bad now that I am in the town, training people for skilled jobs. I feel so discouraged for the fact that I have been killing people, so sad for the lives that I have dislodged. May God have mercy upon me. | | |

Fury as Matalan sells padded bras to EIGHT-YEAR-OLD girls
By Daily Mail Reporter
UPDATED: 11:32, 14 March 2011 * Comments (31) * Share * * * *

* Range of padded bras available in sizes as small as 28aa * Under-fire retailer promises immediate review
Discount clothes retailer Matalan was under fire today after it was revealed to be selling padded bras to children as young as eight.
The bras, which have already sold out in some sizes, are designed to give the appearance of a developed bosom to pre-teen girls.
The revelation will re-ignite concerns about the sexualisation of young children, which led to at least three retailers pulling products from their shelves last year.

Padded: The bras, which come in sizes as small as 28aa, are designed to give the appearance of a developed bust to pre-teen girls
Matalan's pink gingham padded bras, which cost just £4.50, are featured on the section of the company's website labelled 'girls clothing 3-13yrs'.
They form part of a range of structured bras aimed at pre-teens, in sizes as small as 28aa, and come with a description that boasts: 'Matching Underwear Available.'
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* One in three say high street is still sexualising girls * 'Shocking array' of sexual clothing and games for children available on the high street
Others are available in black and white, and are 'lightly padded for support' according to the website. Indicating their popularity, each line has at least one size sold out.
Lingerie-style white lace bra and knickers sets are also available, as well as hot-pants-style denim shorts.
The products are on sale despite a storm last year about the marketing of overtly sexual clothing to youngsters that led to three retailers pulling lines after complaints from parents.

Family retailer: Matalan has promised an immediate review of the ranges and says it is committed to only selling clothing to children that it considers appropriate

Provocative: Children may be copying the daring fashions of celebrities like 18-year-old singer Miley Cyrus
Last April, Primark was forced to abandon its range of padded bikinis for children following a public outcry which culminated in David Cameron branding the sale ‘disgraceful’.
The £4 bikinis, in pink with gold stars and black with white spots, were designed for girls aged seven to eight.
That same month, Tesco was criticised for selling high-heeled Disney Princess shoes for girls three years and over.
Despite taking the bikinis off its shelves, Primark continues to sell padded ‘My First Bra’ underwear for primary school girls.
A recent survey found that more than one in three adults think children’s clothes ranges in High Street stores are too grown-up – a significant increase from 2010 when the figure was closer to a quarter.
The survey of 2,000 adults by researchers Mintel found that 36 per cent – more than one in three – thought children’s clothing ranges were too grown-up.
Among women the figure rose to 41 per cent.
And for adults aged between 45 and 54 it was even higher – almost half said they were concerned.
Experts warned that retailers may be targeting impressionable young girls by producing children’s versions of provocative outfits worn by their favourite celebrities, such as 18-year-old American singer Miley Cyrus.
Matalan promised an immediate review of the ranges, adding: 'Matalan is a family retailer, and is committed to only selling clothing for children that it considers appropriate.'

Disney star Miley Cyrus criticised over provocative photo shoot
Miley Cyrus, the Disney teen-star, has come in for criticism after posing for provocative photographs for a third time.
7:00AM BST 25 Jun 2009
Cyrus, 16, famous for her role as Hannah Montana, is pictured straddled across a chair in a pair of shorts and a tight vest as she smoulders into the camera.

The young star has caused controversy in the past after posing for provocative photographs
The image was posted on micro-blogging site Twitter by film-maker Adam Shankman, who is producing her new film, The Last Song.
In another photograph posted on the site, Miley pouts as she sidles up to Shankman, 44, who is openly homosexual.
Shankman, who directed Hairspray, set up the pictures, which were taken on location in Georgia.
Defending Cyrus from criticism, he said: "Miley is a sweet angel who works tirelessly and endlessly, and is allowed to have fun in the make up room.

Hannah Montana and the provocative adult outfits

Call of duty: Modern Warfare
Games that we let Children play with free reign

Child fashions beginning to mimic that of Adults.
Evidence that childhood is becoming young adulthood.

May 9, 2010
How Childhood Has Evolved

Michael Glenwood for The Chronicle Review
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Michael Glenwood for The Chronicle Review
By Melvin Konner
As a graduate student in the 1960s, I joined Irven DeVore and Richard Lee in a multifaceted study of the !Kung San, then still hunter-gatherers, in northwestern Botswana. Some anthropologists were persuaded that such studies would shed light on human origins, and some psychologists were convinced that infancy research had a similar role to play in helping us understand the individual. So it seemed logical to investigate, so to speak, the origins of the origins.
Not that either of those propositions was uncontroversial. Both Franz Boas's disciples in the United States and the structural anthropologists in Europe had rejected any notion that evolution orders cultures, and so there were those who found the claims of researchers on hunter-gatherers to be nothing less than offensive. We were, however, careful to point out that hunter-gatherers were not different from other people biologically or even psychologically, but were perfectly modern human beings living in the very circumstances that dominated human evolution. It was this overlap between them and early human beings—the ones who lived before the invention of agriculture—that led us to think that those who persisted in this way of life could shed light on our origins.
Then there was the question of childhood development. The idea that what happens in infancy might be of overriding importance in later development was also questionable. Some observers argued that the first three years of life were all that really mattered. (The re-emergence of that idea about a decade ago, in the language of brain science, didn't make it any more valid.) It was probably the lingering sway of psychoanalysis that made this such a tempting hypothesis in the 1960s, but attempts to reconstruct in retrospect the influences that shape patients' lives do not constitute scientific evidence.
While I was in Botswana, Jerome Kagan—one of the most brilliant of infancy researchers and one of my advisers—was doing research in rural Guatemala, where he, Robert Klein, and other collaborators saw infants who got none of the stimulation thought essential by middle-class parents in America, but who at age 10 performed very nicely, thank you, on basic age-appropriate cognitive tests. Kagan became deeply skeptical of the importance of early experience. By the late 1990s, as Judith Rich Harris conducted a frontal assault on "the nurture assumption," Kagan began to think that the pendulum had swung too far. But by then he, and many other developmentalists, were committed to genetic, temperamental, and neurobiological investigations and were less interested in the nurture assumption or its challenges.
I returned from Africa in the early 1970s to a revolution in the study of evolution. The new scholarship incorporated sociobiology, behavioral ecology, and what would become evolutionary psychology, but it is best and most comprehensively called neo-Darwinian theory. At first it seemed so mechanistic and trivializing that when applied to human behavior it often produced psychological and political revulsion. A letter to The New York Review of Books in 1975 that was signed by a number of distinguished scientists accused E.O. Wilson, one of the field's leaders, of joining "the long parade of biological determinists whose work has served to buttress the institutions of their society by exonerating them from responsibility for social problems." Yet this revulsion was often followed by critical appraisal, and then grudging and partial acceptance. I went through those stages, and by 1976 I was convinced that neo-Darwinism would someday have a small but important place in the spectrum of behavioral and social science—a prediction that was considered weak by enthusiasts and anathema by critics, but one now widely recognized to be true.
In 1979 I signed a contract with Harvard University Press to write a book on evolution and childhood. I thought it would take three years; it took three decades. In that time, advances in the fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, behavior genetics, and brain development greatly enhanced our understanding of childhood. There were thousands of person-years of studying animal behavior in the wild, hundreds of well-designed experiments testing Darwinian hypotheses about human behavior, enormous samples analyzed by advanced statistics in twin and adoption studies, accelerating gene technology, and functional brain imaging in real time in adolescents and even in children.
Those and other advances were both causes and results of a rapidly changing intellectual atmosphere. For one thing, both neo-Darwinism and behavioral genetics gained traction at a pace and in ways that I never predicted. A watershed moment was in 1997, when Newsweek splashed across the top of two pages in a special issue on childhood, "Scientists Estimate That Genes Determine Only About 50 Percent of a Child's Personality." To the extent that such a number is meaningful, it made good sense to me, but 20 years earlier, you would have been savaged for a far more modest guesstimate. Wilson, the author of Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Harvard University Press, 1975), had ice water poured on his head on the stage at a national scientific meeting, and Sandra Wood Scarr, a leading developmental psychologist, was spat upon on a major university campus; neither of them is remotely a genetic determinist. So the fact that "only about 50 percent" was now news showed just how far we had come.
Behavioral ecology and ethology, too, were transformed by neo-Darwinian ideas. Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and a few other important biologists continued to oppose them, but if Gould actually read Natural History, the magazine he wrote for so eloquently for decades, he must have noticed that hardly an issue went by without an article that was suffused with concepts like competition, reproductive success, life-history theory, the evolution of altruism, and other attempts to find and measure adaptations. (This phenomenon was even more evident in scholarly journals.)
Evolutionary psychology, meanwhile, secured a niche in psychological science. And behavior-genetic analysis went from being easily challenged and occasionally even fraudulent to achieving scientific credibility. And then genetics took its greatest step, which was to be able to study genes and genomes directly. True, the promise of linking specific genes to complex behavior remains mainly a promise; unlike decoding the genome, this is an enterprise not of decades but of centuries. Still, genes are no longer an abstraction, and the hard work of figuring out how they shape the brain, and therefore behavior, is under way.
But this work is not the death knell for environmental influences on human development; quite the contrary. For instance, the genetic disorder phenylketonuria (PKU), a form of progressive mental retardation in infants resulting from a simple genetic mutation, can be managed by maintaining a special diet. And there are recent examples of how studying genes deepens our understanding of environmental influence. Genetic markers like the neurotransmitter-related enzyme monoamine oxidase, certain types of dopamine receptors, and perhaps the serotonin transporter all have variants that in some studies make individuals more vulnerable to psychological stress during early life. Those findings and countless more like them might one day enable us to tailor environments to infants and children, focusing our interventions with uncanny specificity.
The era when genetic hypotheses and discoveries resulted in a nihilistic attitude toward the prospects of some children is behind us—and good riddance. That said, there are still political and moral hazards in this work; vigilance is always needed. Discoveries will always be abused by some ideologues. But it is no longer possible to stop, slow, or ignore the advance of a science that now has great and well-deserved intellectual momentum.
Two other changes over the past 30 years make this a good moment to explore the evolution of childhood. First, advances in brain imaging are now as impressive as those in genomics, and it has influenced every branch of behavioral and social science. Before we could look at brains only after death, or very crudely during life, and supplement those meager findings with evidence from the study of other animals, and then guess how the brain generates its major product, behavior. Now we can watch brain circuits in action, down to the level of millimeters, while mental processes are going on.
For technical reasons, this has not been as easy to do in infants and children as in adults, but those difficulties are being addressed. Work by Mark Johnson on the development of face processing; by Jessica Dubois and Jésus Pujol on the emergence of language; and by Eric Nelson, Lawrence Steinberg, and Sarah-Jayne Blakemore on the tug of war between impulse and inhibition in adolescent social behavior, all demonstrate the tremendous power of imaging to refine our understanding of child development. Behavioral changes can't be explained by brain maturation alone, but imaging brings a whole new kind of information to bear on children's mental life, whether as cause, effect, or both.
Second, cognitive neuroscience is no longer concerned merely with how the brain enables us to see a line, remember a word, or execute a calculation. In the field's early stages, cognition meant the things that can be measured by intelligence tests. With few exceptions, emotional intelligence, relationships, and emotions themselves were not considered suitable objects for serious study. Those areas were left to the psychoanalysts to speculate about as best they could. By the 1990s, however, prominent scientists like Kagan, Antonio Damasio, Richard Davidson, Robert Sapolsky, and Stephen Suomi turned their attention in these once-disdained directions and began to see new crucial dimensions of brain and behavior.
All of this research suggests that the evolution of intelligence and mind is driven not just by things like making tools and remembering food locations, but also by the vital need to negotiate emotions and relationships in the course of achieving reproductive success. That need is of the essence of higher-brain function; it is where the biobehavioral rubber meets the evolutionary road.
Where does anthropology, especially cross-cultural research, fit into this story? By 1970 psychological anthropology seemed on the cusp of a scientific revolution, with thinkers like Roy D'Andrade, Robert LeVine, and Beatrice and John Whiting developing careful methods of measuring child behavior and child-rearing in cultures across the globe. But as Patricia Greenfield deftly put it, anthropology took postmodernism "on the chin," and it did so at a time when opportunities for both scientific and humanistic research were dissolving. The result was a generation of critiques of past work, sometimes verging on political and philosophical cant, instead of primary studies of vanishing cultures.
Fortunately, some anthropologists ducked the blow and kept empirically oriented cultural anthropology alive. Many were motivated mainly by evolutionary or ecological hypotheses. Some collaborated with ethologists and psychologists to put the study of childhood on an ever-firmer base of empirical evidence. And although postmodernism was almost as inimical to Boasian descriptive ethnology as it was to the new forms of evolutionary anthropology, it was the latter where the greatest ire was raised. Some anthropology departments, including those at Harvard and Stanford, even broke apart for a time over the role of science and evolution in the discipline, but progress continued.
So where do we stand now in our grasp of how evolution shapes child development?
Human development is a legacy of the remote past and the basis of all we think about and do in relation to infants and children. The first three months of life, which have aptly been called the fourth trimester, are a legacy of the necessary early expulsion of human fetuses from the womb to avoid an even worse crunch than childbirth already is. Erect posture, followed by brain expansion, made this necessary. The result is a newborn not exactly asocial, but not yet responsive to social cues, and certainly in need of care. And parents should be patient. The programmed social awakening of the third month of life will meet almost all expectations, and it can't be rushed.
Another legacy of human evolution is the expansion of middle childhood, the period between age 6 or so and puberty. Alan Mann, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University and perhaps the leading authority on childhood in the fossil record, now sees this as a major human advance. In the course of what psychologists call the 5-to-7-year shift, the hard-to-control emotions of early childhood are left behind and replaced by logical patterns of thought and the ability to think about thought itself. Across cultures, it is a time when more is expected of children and more responsibility assigned to them. Biologically, middle childhood is a period of slower growth and calmer hormonal flux, ideal for a unique human enterprise: the acquisition of large stores of cultural knowledge.
That doesn't stop with the advent of puberty, but the dynamic changes greatly. Teenagers enter, in some form, the human mating dance, and that involves competition even in cultures where it is largely controlled by elders through arranged marriage. And groups beset by enemies must turn boys into warrior-defenders. It's a developmental phase fraught with danger for both sexes, and the evolutionary legacy is evident. Hormones mobilized by maturational change enable sexual and aggressive behavior, eventually in an adult mode. But there's the rub: How long will it, or should it, take?
The news of the past decade or so is that the human brain continues its maturational march between the ages of 10 and 20. The frontal cortex and other areas needed for mature thought are not fully developed until at least the end of that period. Meanwhile, the average age at which children reach puberty (as defined by hormonal change) has dropped at least two or three years over the past two centuries. That is not evolution but revolution, and it is likely that the endocrine change now occurs earlier in relation to brain development as well as to chronological age. If so, we have an even starker problem than the slowness of brain growth: hormonal surges at ever-younger brain ages and ever-lower levels of inhibition. The implications for schooling, for the increasing sexualization of the young, and for the culpability of juvenile offenders are potentially transformative.
That brings us to another way that evolution aids our understanding of childhood. If through most of human history puberty began later, then we now face a mismatch between our evolutionary design and our current environment. A clear example of this discordance is found in studies of childhood nutrition and activity. Children throughout our evolution were continually active, mostly in play and exploration, but also in providing some of their own subsistence. Their diets included substantial amounts of lean meat and fish, extremely low levels of saturated fat, salt, and refined carbohydrates, high intake of vegetables and fruits, large amounts of fiber, and a broad spectrum of micronutrients like calcium and vitamin C.
If there is any such thing as a natural lifestyle, that is it, and our modern departure from it has predictably engendered an epidemic of childhood and adolescent obesity, as well as what used to be called adult-onset diabetes. Calls for more acceptance of obesity are at odds with evolution and, more important, with children's health.
What about other characteristics of hunter-gatherer childhood, such as nursing, mother-infant co-sleeping, immediate parental response to crying, and the like? Here I would be more cautious, since, unlike in the case of diet and activity, we do not have decisive evidence for the advantages of those choices. However, neither do we have evidence that there is anything wrong with them, and, especially as they are part of the deep human past, pending further study parents should be left alone to make their own decisions.
Another thing is clear from the evolutionary record: Mothers have never done the job of child-rearing alone. Among primates, only humans provide for their young after weaning. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California at Davis, showed in her book, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding (Harvard University Press, 2009), that required the support of grandmothers, fathers, and others. We should think of the natural human adaptation for child-rearing as one in which mothers are central but have large amounts of support.
Evolutionary thinking is particularly useful in illuminating our view of childhood in the realm of facultative adaptation—a sort of "if then" proposition built into our genes. Evolution and genes sometimes say, This is how it must always be, but often they say, If in such-and-such an environment, respond with this adaptation, but if in this other, very different context, respond with that one. Sometimes the consequences are dire for children. Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, of McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ontario, have shown that abuse and neglect, up to and including killing children, are almost 100 times more likely in households with an adult male who is not genetically related to the child. Nothing, I think, could make it clearer that evolutionary explanations must be kept completely separate from moral and legal judgments. Yet this well-established fact about violence committed against children, independent of socioeconomic status and shown across national boundaries, should lead us to a new ways of thinking about abuse prevention. They can be subtle, not draconian, but they should recognize the facts.
From the viewpoint of the child, early life experience may serve as an important signal to understand her environment. The lack of trust that most psychologists believe stems from unstable nurturance can also be thought of, in evolutionary perspective, as an adaptive response to a situation that is at best unpredictable. The adaptation may even include maturing and initiating sexual activity earlier. That needn't constrain us to accept such harsh environments as inevitable, much less to condone the conditions that give rise to them. But since they do exist, we should adopt a more positive view of childhood adaptation in less-than-favorable circumstances. Respecting children rather than pathologizing them (or even while trying to help with their pathology) can in some cases be a good thing.
The evolutionary theorist Theodosius Dobzhansky used to say that nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution. We are now in a position to say that very little in childhood does, either—or, at a minimum, that children's behavior, their developmental course, and even our treatment of them make much more sense in that light. In a world in which religious fundamentalists and some postmodern liberals stand in unholy alliance against Darwin's science, we will do well to keep our minds open. Our children will benefit from a view of them and their care that includes our best understanding of that science.
Melvin Konner is a professor of anthropology and behavioral biology at Emory University. His latest book, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind, was just published by Harvard University Press.