Psychology has a lot to tell us about raising children. Consider Sandra Bem’s work in the ‘70s on teaching children to embrace a variety of emotions and characteristics. Bem said parents should certainly teach sons that they will find themselves in situations when they should be forceful, competitive, and dominant. But Bem also said parents must teach boys that sometimes sensitivity, emotionality, caring, and empathy are appropriate, and showing such traits does not destroy their masculinity. When a parent tells boys they must always show tough-guy masculinity, they will be unable to participate in a broad range of productive interactions with others. Bem also argued that parents should teach girls to be nurturant, supportive, sensitive, and understanding. But parents must also teach them that sometimes they need to be assertive, competitive, forceful, and decisive, or they will find themselves dominated by those around them. Plus, girls should be taught that firmly standing up for themselves in no way sacrifices their femininity.
Bem’s work deals with how we teach gender roles to kids, that is, what sorts of behavior are appropriate for males and females. I have heard politicians confuse this topic with “sexualization.” According to the American Psychological Association (APA), sexualization means regarding people as sex objects, and evaluating them in terms of their physical characteristics and sexiness. Women, for instance – and far more often than men – are frequently portrayed in the media in a sexual manner, such as wearing revealing clothing, and displaying suggestive poses. The APA maintains that this focus on physical attributes is not only psychologically damaging to young girls, but also contributes to sexist attitudes and sexual violence in society.
In 2006, the APA formed a task force to examine sexualization. The task force highlighted numerous studies that provide evidence of the sexualization of women and girls in the media, and found negative consequences of repeated attention to physical appearance: it interfered with other mental and physical activities; it led to increased feelings of shame and anxiety about one’s body; and, it increased the incidence of anorexia nervosa among 10-to 19-year-old girls. Boys were also affected. Their inability to attract girls who fit impossibly narrow ideals of female attractiveness lowered boys’ self-esteem and masculine identity. Healthy friendships and romantic interactions with girls were difficult for many boys who believed they had to find a girl who fit the media ideal.
Bem’s work on appropriate roles and personality traits described earlier has clear lessons for how to help young people be better prepared to cope with stressors in their lives. Sexualization provides an equally clear lesson on how young people, especially girls, become vulnerable to those stressors. Young girls see and read the false sexualization message from a variety of media platforms, and they suffer a host of negative emotional reactions like shame, anxiety, sadness, confusion, frustration, ambivalence, and fear. Then, they wrongly conclude that they are mentally ill – not normal. This belief can trigger deeper despair, depression, and thoughts of suicide, especially in those who already feel rejected, abandoned, confused, and alone. The irony is, the experience of those emotions is quite normal and a part of living. The key to coping with them is to acquire flexible actions that help to deal with them in rational and confident ways. When it comes to our adolescents and young adults, however, many have been indulged and overly protected from adversity by parents and other adults, with the unfortunate consequence that they never learn how to deal with negative and confusing experiences like sexualization, or with negative emotions like shame and anxiety. Too many parents today are more concerned with how to help their kids avoid sources of anxiety than with helping kids navigate their way through, and cope with, what is a complicated and frustrating path to adulthood. Next time you read about the increase in psychological problems in young people, ask yourself if we are doing enough to enhance parental guidance about Bem’s work, and enough to minimize the perverse role of stressors like sexualization.
Psychology and Stress 