It's the shoes in these pics that bother me. I don't like to see heels on girls, quite honestly, until they turn 18. But I have to say, whereas Suri looks to me like she wore her play-princess shoes out into the rain - Noah looks like she's being, well, p*mped out by her mother.

What I don't understand is how adults can have given enough positive feedback on looks like these, for people to have begun marketing them. I have a friend who says - and I think he's right - there is something wrong with you, if you look at a child and don't see a child.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see sexualized clothing for young girls in real life. What the Hollywood elite are dressing their kids in doesn't count as "real life".

I see middle and high school aged girls wearing slightly trashy clothes, but it's certainly not all of them. Jut a few, really. I see them walking to school in the morning on the way to drop off my daughter at her very average suburban elementary school, which is in a very average middle class area with mostly average parents with typical middle-class values. The only elementary school aged child I have seen wearing shoes with a bit of a heel (and really, it's only a 1.5" block heel) is the little eight-year-old who immigrated from Russia last year. She also wears a fur hat (no kidding!) and stiff polyester dresses with white starched collars. I've seen both the mom and the grandma, and they all dress like that. I'm thinking it might be a cultural thing.

The two pics in the article are really horrible. I think it's bad enough if they start in their early teens. I can see it with my sister and her friends. She's twelve and a real tomboy (so this doesn't apply to her) but most of her friends wear make-up and mini-skirts and so on. She goes to the same school I attended, an all girls school with a catholic background. My age group started dressing like that with 14 or 15, not with 12. I think that's early enough!

I'm already scared and my DD is 2.5! I intend to give her only choices that are appropriate (but am already struggling with her absolute refusal to wear certain items - Buttons for instance so not sure how this will work out) My pediatrician has 4 daughters ages 3-8 and is struggling with this. My DD swimwear is rashguard tops and shorts or skirts (mostly to save her precious skin but also I find many TODDLER swimsuits too provocative for my taste) I hope I can be a guiding force to keep her from these items, but I wish they were not so sensationalized and glamorized. A neighbor I spoke with has 2 daughters and one is a tomboy dressing in actual boys' clothing, the other loves her short shorts. Given the choice he is much happier with the tomboy outfits.

I have no children, but my really good friend turns to me a lot to help him dress his daughter (single dad! very cute ... single dad... *cough*) ... but his daughter is five and she wants to dress like me! HAHA.

So if I have a dress and a cardi, she wants a dress and cardi. The way I figure, if I don't dress all crazy like Noah, then she won't want to dress like that.

We also decided to send her to a uniform school. Phew.

It's funny that this old thread got revived from a spam post (now deleted), but it's still really a hot button topic.
I thought that I had seen it all, but I got a shock at the dance competition this weekend. There was a group of girls (11-13 yr olds)- very typical dancer bodies- long limbed and very thin. Most of the girls looked like they hadn't yet reached puberty. Their costume looked sweet and cute from the front- it had a western style flair: red cowboy hats, a peasant type blouse with puffed cap sleeves, and denim blue booty shorts. When they turned around, you could see that their backsides were padded. They danced to that song- Honky Tonk Ba Dong A Dong. They were up there waggling their fake booties around and slapping themselves on the behind. My jaw just dropped. People in the audience were laughing and whooping it up, but it really bothered my 15 year old son. He said that with girls so young, it made him feel like a pedophile to enjoy that kind of a performance. He's right, though- it's not natural for girls that age to be looking/doing that.