The saddest result of all of this public sexuality, violence, extreme stunts, and overexposed celebrity wildness on children is that the predators are having a field day. Every week, another one or more girls is abducted and the outcomes are heartbreaking.

It is not just the celebrities who are a problem, however. In an extreme example of parental and group support for truly inappropriate behavior that is associated with reward, there is a booming market in “pageants” and “talent shows”, where there is now even discussion about allowing toddlers to dress in string bikinis. There there are dance performances with grown men that should be outlawed and there are adult male judges who are entirely inappropriate viewers of the disturbing spectacles that  parents willingly allow.

In families where drug and alcohol abuse go on, the children will not know that the behavior is wrong. It is just normal life, as far as they are concerned. When others idolize celebrities who have histories of drug and alcohol abuse, children will never get an understanding that substance abuse has devastating consequences. After all, celebrities go on to have fabulous lives, why can’t average people?

Yet no one will ever get through to parents who abuse substances or to participants and directors of the pageant industry that a line has to be drawn somewhere. The resistance to any form of criticism or questioning of their way of life is met with disturbing and stubborn resistance and refusal to change.

In homes all over the world, girls gain far more approval when they dance and dress attractively or even behave somewhat seductively than they do when they engage in behavior that leads to self defense or self sufficiency in life.

Simply put, when social approval is greater for one behavior than it is for another behavior, humans will engage in the behavior that gets the reward. Celebrities engage in the behavior and costuming that gets the approval of the audience, so the audience has to bear much of the responsibility for celebrity behavior.

When children discover that their parents, peers, siblings, teachers and other authority figures approve of, reward, or favor increasingly seductive and outrageous celebrity behavior, then it is a natural process that they, themselves will try to imitate that behavior in order to get their own emotional and social rewards.

When children are allowed to view adult content and they witness the approval and applause of their parents, siblings and peers there is no recourse for them but to feel that, by imitating what they see, they will also get approval and applause. When the three year old is up on YouTube, gyrating to a seductive music video and the response is “how cute”, instead of “how wrong”, then the problem will grow and continue until the damage is irreparable.

And the damage will always become irreparable when the child grows older and goes out into the larger world with the wrong ideas about behavior and reward. Then, the predators will have their field days again and again and again.

Perhaps the link below will help to get the point across that, unless children are shielded from adult content, are shielded from drug and alcohol abuse, are shielded from predators, and are rewarded for better forms of behavior, the problem will continue to increase, at a  terrible cost.

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children