It’s not just padded bras and lipstick – girls are experimenting with sex way too soon and teen pregnancies are on the rise. Bryce Corbett reports on this disturbing new trend.
It’s two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in suburban Melbourne. A pink limousine pulls into a driveway and disgorges a gaggle of excited 10-year-olds. They’re here to celebrate a friend’s birthday, at a party organised by professional event planners. Where once their afternoon would have been spent apple bobbing, playing pass the parcel and munching fairy bread, today, they’ll have a mini-facial, a manicure and a foot spa, get their hair done and have their faces made up. It’s just one of hundreds of so-called Princess Pamper Parties that will take place across the country today.
Meanwhile, in Sydney, news breaks that a beautician has turned away a woman who brought her nine-year-old to have her legs waxed. A week later in the UK, clothing chain Primark buckles to pressure from outraged parent groups and removes padded bikini tops for girls as young as seven from its shelves.
In the pages of the gossip mags, we see Suri Cruise, four, wearing heels, Jordan and Peter Andre’s two-year-old Princess Tiaamii, being dolled up in false eyelashes and 10-year-old Noah Cyrus on the red carpet in lycra, a corset and patent leather stiletto boots. Welcome to the world of being a little girl in 2010.
There was a time, not long ago, when being a little girl meant playing with dolls, skipping rope and staging tea parties. That was when sugar and spice and all things nice was as prescriptive as the parameters of girlhood got. Yet, these days, you’re not worthy of being a tween unless you’ve mastered mascara or had your first eyebrow wax.
In our cash-rich, time-poor society, parents are standing by helplessly as their daughters get old before their time. There’s mounting concern among parents that our kids are having foot spas and going to supermodel parties when they should be running barefoot or pinning tails on donkeys. Yet, until recently, few parents felt emboldened to speak up – for fear of being considered fuddy-duddies.
“But it’s just a bit of harmless fun,” says Janine Lynch, director of Pink Limos, one of Melbourne’s purveyors of Princess Pamper Parties. “Little girls have always liked to dress up and wear Mummy’s high heels. We’re just adding a bit of karaoke and glitter make-up into the mix. It’s not like we’re turning them into JonBenet [Ramsey]. I honestly don’t know what all the fuss is about.”
Read more of this story in the October issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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