There's been a lot of noise about little girls acting and dressing way too sexy lately. To be perfectly honest, I wasn't that concerned when Miley Cyrus took her clothes off, or when her then-9-year-old sister, Noah, showed up for a Los Angeles Halloween event dressed in what looked like a Goth hooker outfit. (Those crazy child stars, I said to myself.) I rolled my eyes at the YouTube clip of scantily clad 8- and 9-year-olds in a dance competition, pelvis-thrusting to Beyoncé's "Single Ladies"; it reminded me of the show Toddlers & Tiaras - disturbing, but very different from the reality of most kids. But then I started hearing reports from my real-life friends. One complained that they only make padded training bras now and that her sixth-grader looked like a Pamela Anderson wannabe. Another called to talk about her 6-year-old's dance-recital costume: fuchsia hotpants with heart appliqués on each buttock. The insanity seems to be trickling down to real girls - our girls. Take this so-wrong-I-hope-it's-not-right statistic: According to a survey by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and cosmogirl.com, 22 percent of girls ages 13 to 19 have sent or posted nude or semi-nude pictures of themselves online.
Luckily, Louisa doesn't know how to operate the camera or computer, and I feel pretty certain that I can prevent her from turning into a teen who lists "topless dancer" as one of her career aspirations. Yet the first thing you learn in parenting is that pride comes before a fall (you know, the old "My children will never watch TV/whine/sleep in my bed" thing). So I wondered: When do I start taking action to protect her from our supersexed culture - and what do I do, short of sending her to a nunnery? I posed the question to educators and moms around the country - and while I discovered that it all begins much earlier than you'd think, I also learned that there's a lot that parents can and should control.