In Part III of this series, I wrote about how our unconscious ambivalence toward our children has been freed up for more overt expression by the separation of sex and procreation. Until fairly recently, there was little recognition that children were anything other than smaller versions of adults. One of the many things that Freud was attacked for was his position that children have complicated fantasy lives, including sexual fantasy lives, and they are based on the child's limited ability to understand adult sexuality. He also noted, and a great deal of evidence has mounted through the years since, that children's minds do not work in the same way adult minds work and, as a consequence, they do not understand the adult world in which they live in the same terms as adults. This has serious consequences and bears on the ambivalence that is expressed by our culture toward our child.
Good enough parents know that children should be protected, as much as possible, from things they cannot adequately comprehend. We do not expect our 10year olds to read Physics books, or run Marathons; if we forced them to do things that their bodies and minds were unprepared for, they would become frustrated and overwhelmed; it would be a traumatic experience for the child. Yet our mass culture bombards our children with material that is over stimulating and traumatizing, with minimal evidence of concern from the purveyors of such entertainment. In fact, Hollywood, the music industry, television, advertisers, and other agents of our mass culture, often go out of their way to direct their products toward children who have no chance of bringing an adult sensibility to the situation. Even those who are supposed to provide some guidance to parents and movie makers as to what constitutes appropriate fare for children, are doing more harm than good much of the time. They will give an "R" rating to a movie because of the number of "dirty" words, all of which the typical 6th grader has heard countless times, while giving a PG rating to movies which show nudity, barely dressed actors who have no particular or obvious relationship engaged in sexual activity, and mindless violence that should shock, but no longer does.
The classic situation of trauma that Freud depicted was of the child viewing the parents engaged in intercourse. Children have no ability to understand adult sexuality and to them, sex looks frightening, as if daddy is hurting mommy. Exposure to the "Primal scene" is indeed a traumatic situation, but there are ubiquitous lesser degrees of traumatization that our children are heir to every day. In today's National Review On line, there is an article titled, Culture-Whipped, by Gil Reavill in which he recounts the pervasive sexual stimulation his young daughter is prone to in just a few hours of a typical day.
Let me sketch out a day I spent with my middle-school age daughter. It started with an episode of a "tween" sitcom — that is, a show targeted for kids between the ages of nine and twelve. I passed through the room where my daughter was watching the program and just happened to catch a scene where twin seven-year-old girls tried out a new cheerleading routine they were practicing.
"Shake it, shake it, shake it," the seven-year-olds squeaked, sticking out their fannies, slapping them, and then reacting as if they'd just touched a hot stove. I looked at my daughter, who gazed at the tube with the vacant-eyed look that is, if statistics about TV watching are right, the most common facial expression in America. I felt upset at the clear sexualization of a pair of prepubescent girls, and especially annoyed that their antics were played for laughs. "Shake it, shake it, shake it," chanted the seven-year-olds.Ha, ha, ha, went the laugh track.
"How cute" was the barely subliminal message being conveyed to my daughter. "Look at these tykes acting like a pair of pole dancers!"
Real funny, I posed my unspoken thought against the canned laughter. But I resisted the impulse to point out the inappropriateness of the message. Just the day before, my daughter and I had talked about a Ludacris song she liked, about thuggin' and clubbin' and ho's (street slang for "whores"), and I didn't want to come off as constantly preaching. In present-day America, we learn to swallow many of our responses to modern culture, so as not to appear prudish, vanilla, or outré.
A commercial interrupted the seven-year-old lap dancers. A trailer for The Girl Next Door, the latest theatrical movie from Fox about to open. "I want to see that," my daughter said. I let that pass, too. The movie is rated R, and my daughter is not allowed to see R-rated movies. The plot involves a porn star moving in next door to a teenage boy.
Sexual overstimulation is a chronic trauma. When children are subject to chronic overstimulation, it affects their executive functions. Executive functions are those parts of the mental apparatus which allow us to comprehend our environment, form connections, and master and control our own internal and external environments. The executive functions are crucial to learning and include alertness, memory, attention, concentration, pattern recognition, concept formation, categorization, comprehension, analysis-synthesis, abstraction, problem solving, affect modulation, logical reasoning. Notice how children who are impaired in these areas (attention, for example) are likely to be seen as having Attention Deficit Disorder.
When we compound sexual overstimulation with the emphasis on rapidly changing sensation in order to catch and maintain attention, we end up with a generation who have difficulty with sustained concentration and attention, who have little tolerance for the effort required to read and parse a difficult book, who are emotionally distanced from their own physical experiences.
This is not how loving parents treat their children.
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