Letting Children be Children
regulations to protect children but some gaps exist Regulators cannot realistically be expected to anticipate detailed developments in the new media. However an absence of regulation does not absolve businesses from acting responsibly by themselves
Theme 4 – making parents' voices heard
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Parents have told us that they feel they cannot ma e their voices heard and that they often lack the confidence to speak out on sexualisation and commercialisation issues for fear of being labelled a prude or out of touch. Business and industry sectors and their regulators need to make clear that they welcome and take seriously feedback on these subjects. Given the technology available, regulators and businesses should be able to find more effective ways to encourage parents to tell them what they think quickly and easily and to be transparent in telling parents how they are responding to that feedback. Once parents now that their views are being ta en seriously we would expect them to respond positively towards companies that listen to their concerns.
What is our answer?
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The Review has encountered two very different approaches towards helping children deal with the pressures to grow up too quickly he first approach seems to suggest that we can try to keep children wholly innocent and unknowing until they are adults he world is a nasty place and children should be unsullied by it until they are mature enough to deal with it his is a view that finds its expression in outrage, for example that childrenswear departments stock clothes for young children that appear to be merely scaled down versions of clothes with an adult sexuality, such as padded bras It depends on an underlying assumption that children can be easily led astray so that even glimpses of the adult world will hurry them into adulthood. Worse still this approach argues what children wear or do or say could ma e them vulnerable to predators or paedophiles.
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The second approach is that we should accept the world for what it is and simply give children the tools to understand it and navigate their way through it better. Unlike the first approach, this is coupled with an assumption that children are not passive receivers of these messages or simple imitators of adults; rather they willingly interact with the commercial and sexualised world and consume what it has to offer his is a view that says to do anything more than raise the ability of children to understand the commercial and sexual world around them, and especially their view of it through the various media is to create a moral panic he argument suggests that we would infantilise adults if we make the world more benign for children, so we should 'adultify' children.
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This Review concludes that neither approach, although each is understandable, can be effective on its own. We recognise that the issues raised by the commercialisation and sexualisation of childhood are rooted in the character of our wider adult culture and that children need both protection from a range of harms, and knowledge of different kinds appropriate to their age, understanding and experience. Parents have the primary role here
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