From around the news

Is it nature? Nurture? Or both? Judith Rich Harris claims neither -- it's peers. It appears that she took her control group -- her natural and adopted children, and when the adopted child behaved, well, like an adopted child [Silverstein and Roszia (1999) have identified core issues related to adoption: loss, grief, rejection with accompanying feelings of guilt/shame, identity, and intimacy/ relationships issues. As noted before, these core issues do not imply that the institution of adoption is pathological. Rather, these expected issues evolve logically out of the child's experience of adoption.], she sought and found information that fit her hypothesis.

I've written before about the pornification of little kids. This, dear reader is one of many reasons my daughters don't play with Bratz dolls, have free reign of the TV remote or computer.

The idea for a book about porn culture came to Kevin Scott the day his daughter decided she absolutely had to have a Bratz-doll pony. For months, the 5-year-old had begged him for a Bratz doll—clad in spike heels, fishnets and miniskirt, enormous puppy-dog eyes protruding from her oversized head. Her sexy look seemed a little too sexy for a preschooler, so he and his wife bought her a different doll, which she was happy with. Except that a few months later, Bratz came out with Bratz Babyz. "If Bratz had looked like Barbie hookers, these looked like baby hookers," Scott says. Again, he convinced his daughter that My Little Pony was just as cool—and for a moment, the conversation ended. Until, of course, the Bratz came out with Bratz Ponyz. And then, says Scott, an English professor at a small college in Georgia, "I realized porn culture and I were in a death match for my daughter's soul."

In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn't take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives. Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms.

My solution? Dump the TV and keep the computer in your kitchen, locked up tightly.