Last year in the lead up to Halloween I published the piece, Is Halloween Getting too Sexy for Kids?
Four years ago on Halloween I brought you the article, Too Sexy For Your Kids? | Children, where I discussed how our children are over-sexualized. The issue can be far reaching: from what is playing on the airwaves to what kids can access on the internet, to the language we as adults use.
Once again Hallows Eve is quickly creeping up on us and with the dark night of ghouls and goblins comes the parental nightmare of what costume to get for your little terror. Each day as I collect the mail, it is increasingly adorned with catalogs and flyers packed with all of your night of horror needs, but what is a true fright among these pages is the costumes for children. Once again, and I do feel like a bit of a broken record here, I ask myself; “Are today’s kids being influenced to dress too sexy?”
Playing dress-up is supposed to be full of innocent fantasy about your favorite cartoon, storybook hero or real life role model, not a haunting image of societal disregard for the over-sexualization of little girls. When did Halloween go from G-rated to R-rated?
The fact is that society has certainly become less prudie as you might say, and the evidenced is almost everywhere, with the increase of sexually degrading and explicit lyrics in music, larger use of cuss words and sexual content on TV, clothing with degrading or sexual abbreviations and sayings on clothing. Therefore I ask you, as we see that much of Halloween has become “too sexy” for kids, is the holiday now simply less kid friendly?
The reality is that children do not aspire to be “sexy”, girls don’t seek to be sex icons. As sexy, midriff-baring and skin exposing costumes become just as prolific in the children’s section as the adult section, it is apparent that “kid friendly” is not the target of marketers. The images we fight in the media and now at the stores are doing nothing for the empowerment of little girls across the globe. These girls are only being harmed with the wrong message: that when they dress with less they look prettier and will be more accepted. According to a survey conducted this year by the National Retail Federation, what kids want for Halloween is the fairy tale and cartoon fantasy. The survey showed that the princess remains the most popular Halloween costume for children, with 3.97 million children planning to dress up in this guise on Halloween. Other popular costumes include pirates (1.72 million children), witches (not the sexy witch) (1.65 million) and good old Spiderman (1.51 million). With almost $5 billion expected to be spent this year candy/treats, costumes and decorations, Halloween is the sixth-largest spending holiday, according to the National Retail Federation. So why are kid friendly costumes increasingly more difficult to find?
