Planet tween terror

I dread the day my 12-year -old daughter begs me for a diamond-studded thong over a good ol’ stuffed toy. “They’re all the rage at school, daddy,” she’ll plead as we’re strolling through the mall during the holidays, adding that an older boy (14, presumably) “will totally love them” and that her posse “will be totally jealous” of her for such an extravagant — and kinky — purchase. And if, in a couple of decades, I should find myself a father encountering such a horrendous scene (and the expression “all the rage” still has a place in the era’s youthspeak), I’ll shake my bald head and weep as I look back to ‘07 and blame The Hills, Vanessa Hudgens, and the Grow Your Own toy series for such madness.

Spotting the third harbinger of corruption at the Tween Zone of a local toy chain, a closer look at its packaging told me enough about what may be wrong with today’s little miss pre-teens. Sea monkeys and Chia pets were the whimsical stuff of childhood, but “Grow Your Own Credit Card” or “Grow a Best Friend”?  Whether it’s the latter with enumerated claims like “I would never flirt with your crush” and “Let’s go shopping” or the “Grow Your Own Princess” edition (Princess Chanel to be exact) that declares it “LOVES: cute boys, spa sleepovers, & fashion magazines,” the existence of such toys dangling from shelves begs the question: is this generation raising a bunch of hyper-sexualized, overly materialistic beeyotches? 

Liberal Splurging, Casual Hook-ups

Course, the regular Sodom and Gomorrah that is teen primetime has quite a hand in imbuing such characteristics in the tween demographic. You’ve got the trustfunded Manhattan prep schoolgirls in the much-obsessed-over Gossip Girl (the name should say it all) and MTV’s “reality” deity Liz Gateley stewing the much-talked-about foibles of perma-tanned, cocktail-swigging rich chicks in shows like Laguna Beach and The Hills. Little ponies and Barbies sure ain’t got nothing on blonde LA princesses like Lauren and Heidi and with all the manufactured drama that accompanies LC as she tries to navigate her way — mojito in hand — through make-out sessions with “kyyeeww” (“cute” in proper parlance) boys or debating whether she should blow her parents’ cash on a couple of kyyeeww dresses, young girls all over the world will be watching intently, taking mental note of what kind of guy they should be swapping spit with, which designer bag they should be snapping-up, and why spreading a rumor that your former BFF’s got a sex tape is “totally shady.”

 The Hills are definitely alive with the sound of casual hook-ups, the show’s reality actresses burning plastic on Melrose, and being plastic as they graze each other’s silicone-injected rumps in hip clubs like Les Deux. It’s no wonder a tween girl would accept the Machiavellian fate of young womanhood in this day and age and ask mommy to get her a Copolymer resin toy she can drop into a glass of water to grow her a best friend; or  prince charming; or, hell, implants, if this grow-by-water acquisition truly gets out of hand.

Sure, most 12-year-olds haven’t gone off and traded dolls for rhinestone-studded dildos just yet, but according to a survey of kids aged 7-14 who were living in urban areas such as Metro Manila, Davao, and Cebu, what has grown is the population of material girls owning what were then perceived as adult gadgets: mobile phones and digi-cams. Seemingly harmless and irrelevant, granted, but of 3.5-million children surveyed, 29 percent of girls owned cell phones (a 60 percent rise in the past two years) with 52 percent of all kids agreeing that they needed such communication as SMS and IM to function in the world; all figures indicating that a lot of parents have been providing very young kids devices that they haven’t fully grasped the responsibility to own. The same goes for the 62 percent rise in digital camera ownership, which brings to mind all those teens pelvis-bumping for digi-cams in Makati bars like Ponti or 13-year-old girls ripping their plaid skirts off in front of their webcams for all the dirty old men in cyberspace to see.   

Foreplaytime, kids!

Perhaps it’s the futuro-fatherly part of me overreacting, but it’s hard not to freak out when today’s Disney princess isn’t whipping her fishtail in the sea or twirling around in some huge ball gown. She isn’t wearing anything, in fact, considering High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens is on the Internet baring her ta-tas and no-no zone for the co-star/boyfriend behind the camera. Yet while HSM might have a lot of S&M unfolding behind-the-scenes, Hudgens is still a lesser evil in the all-too-slim menu of role models for 7-14-year-olds out there: Britney chugging Hypnotiq/shopping couture/jumping from sack to sack; LiLo snorting coke/shopping couture/jumping from sack to sack; Paris enjoying a doobie/shopping for pets/crashing another car/jumping from sack to sack…and the list goes on. 

Or young girls could just make like Nicole Richie and get knocked up. After their bordello-appropriate Bratz dolls have popped-out a few Bratz babies (yes, slutty lil’ Bratz babies do exist) and they’ve gotten tired of shaking their asses in front of their Bratz webcams (don’t even ask), they might just go ravage the crotch of the next boy that comes along and become another pre-teen pregnancy statistic in the process. With its good-girl-turned-budding-lil’-sociopath plot, the film Thirteen may have heralded the young women’s x-lib that’s turning lil’ tykes into lil’ whores and innocent girls into Evan Rachel-Woods ripe for Marilyn Manson’s picking. But then it isn’t too late to stop the making of a Grow-Your-Own-Value-System. Bottom line is, if a little more guidance is dropped into the parental well, it might just grow.