Does Your Daughter Really Need A Bra?

This is a serious question for many parents: with our children’s over-exposure to estrogen-mimicking chemicals like BPA in plastic and pesticides in food, more girls are experiencing breast development early. I’ve recently been talking with a couple of other moms who are debating getting bras for girls who are as young as 8 years old!

This is a really challenging situation. After all, when does your daughter really need a bra? Do you buy it for her? Should she choose to wear one herself?

Experts debate on this topic, but for sure you shouldn’t even wonder if it’s time for a bra when you have a preschooler. Despite that, cultural pressures now have very little girls turning themselves into mini-adults, complete with nail polish, lipstick and bras!

These youngsters are in turn needing psychological help in greater and greater numbers.

What’s going on? Child development folks say that by age six, many girls are looking for certain brands of clothes. By age seven, they want carefully coifed hair. Alarmingly, these girls are turning to diets by age 8 to modify their bodies. The sexualization of female childhood is proceeding at a very rapid rate.

This rush to adulthood ends prematurely in the early teens, when these same girls are engaging in sex and sexually-charged behaviors like sexually explicit texting.

I am personally appalled that clothing manufacturers are not just supporting this trend, but may be deliberately driving it. Reporters from the Daily Telegraph found crop-top style bras for toddlers as young as two or three, on the shelves of at least one UK major department store.

Louise Newman, professor of Developmental Psychiatry at Monash University said, “I’ve seen children suffering from clinical depression in primary school because they don’t feel they are pretty enough or thin enough”. These very young girls are already defining themselves in terms of whether they are a suitable sexual object for boys.

Think this is just a British phenomena? Think again. Bras for toddlers were found on sale at Target, by child advocate Julie Gale. Target’s response was to defend the products, saying that parents have a choice whether to buy them or not. (Retailers, however, also have the choice whether to carry the products or not.)

It’s not just child advocates who are incensed by some of the new trends. Parents are appalled that their children are being targeted as the newest consumer group.

Which brings us back to when it’s time to have a bra. Parents - especially mothers - will have to bring all their instincts to bear on this issue. While we don’t want our children to be alienated because they don’t fit it, we also don’t want them to be rushed headlong into a premature (and potentially damaging) false adulthood.

Step carefully. Reaffirm your daughter’s beauty and inherent worth, apart from those limiting and artificial standards that are imposed on women by the fashion industry. Remember that the best way for our daughters to take pride in themselves is for us to self-esteem ourselves, no matter our size and shape. To the extent that we know that our self-worth is ours, no matter what some fashion icon says at a Paris haute-couture show, our daughters will know that too.

Source: News.com.au; BraWise reporting