In spite of these realities, when professional middle-class parents talk, they sometimes imply that the stages of childhood are written in stone. Even more often they evince concern that the world is imposing itself too quickly on their children and that their children are being exposed to specific images at “way too young an age” or “at an earlier age than they should be.” In response, the parents indicate that they want very much to monitor, and remain in control of, the timing of these influences. Hence, they say, their four-year-old should not have a Barbie doll because it has “too much curvature” (although an American Girl doll is “appropriate” for that age), their first-grader should not have “too much homework,” their children of eight or ten should not have to “specialize in sports,” their thirteen-year-old should not be watching Americas Next Top Model, and their fifteen-year-old should not “know more about sex than his parents did when they were eighteen.” A professional middle-class mother of two teenagers believes that she knows what little girls innately “want.” Although she suggests that young girls have entirely “innocent” desires, she also believes that they are easily seduced into materialistic and sexualized pleasures: “I think that the kids grow up so fast. Little girls just want to be little girls, but what catches their eye is the movement, the fancy car commercials, very sexy girls. … It breaks my heart.”
Here, too, nostalgia rears its head: quite frequently the specific prescriptions stem from what the parents themselves imagine were the activities and pleasures of their own childhoods. Hence, parents say their child of six shouldn’t be “experimenting with makeup” but rather should be “reading books, playing outside with other children,” or enjoying the simple delight of a board game.
The vision of a discrete stage of childhood thus rests on a notion of childhood innocence, a notion that contains within it implications of vulnerability, ignorance, and moral purity. It is also a notion that is intimately tied to social class and race/ethnicity, as it quietly ignores centuries of childhood slavery, children’s labor, and children’s exposure to, and involvement in, the everyday activities of the adult world.10 And it ignores both children’s own active engagement in sexual activities at an early age and the multiple ways in which our society eroticizes and makes a fetish of young children." Parents simply declare that their children are, or should be, “innocent” (at least until they deem otherwise).12