They’re on Oprah, Montel and Ricki Lake.
They’re being written about in magazines and reported on in The Journal of Modern Medicine.
They aren’t celebrities, or sports stars, they are kids, and they are being brought to national attention not because of their academic achievements but because they can’t seem to act like children.
Younger and younger kids are beginning to throw themselves into the sexual arena and no one can seem to figure out why.
Whose fault is it?
Well, I’m not going to point any fingers but it’s the parents.
Undoubtedly the detachment that children have begun to feel toward their busy parents is leading to either seeking gratification in some other way or to rebellion in the form of sex.
My junior year in high school is when I actually started noticing it.
My friend’s little sister was getting on birth control and going to “oral parties.”
She was in seventh grade.
One year later on Oprah, I’m watching girls in middle school talk about the first time they performed oral sex on a guy and how great it made them feel.
Immediately I thought “what stupid children.”
But then I realized that maybe these kids didn’t have what I had growing up.
Maybe they didn’t know the fear of God here on earth that my mother instilled in me on a daily basis.
She knew where I was going and with whom I was going to be.
So the thing that must be making these children feel like participating in sexual activity at 11, 12 and 13-years-old must be a missing sense of the motherly God complex, or at the very least a very busy parent that doesn’t have the time to keep his or her children in line.
I’m sure everything from television to the movies has played a major role in invading these children’s thoughts, but nothing, in my mind, that a good parent shouldn’t be able to keep up with.
This is as epidemic as AIDS and violence.
It could ruin an entire generation’s ideas on marriage, commitment and love.
And if the adult parental population isn’t concerned, we as college students should be. Talk to your little brothers and sisters.
If you don’t you’ll probably get a second chance- with your new niece or nephew.
Bridget Nance, 20, is a junior broadcast journalism student from Alexandria, Va. She is The Famuan’s deputy opinions editor, and can be reached at bridge1231@hotmail.com.