R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I must be getting old. Everyday on my way to work, I drive past Menasha High School, and I have the opportunity to observe how teens act and dress in today’s world. Today as I was driving to work, I was alarmed and, quite frankly, a bit disgusted to see what types of clothes teenage girls wear to school. I saw all types of skin-baring outfits, ranging from bare-midriff tops to low-cut tops to tube tops and shorts or skirts that leave nothing to the imagination. I felt like jumping out of my car and throwing a blanket over some of these girls. I’m not sure how any hormone-ridden high school boy can even pay attention in class anymore.

When I was in high school, my parents had pretty strict rules about what I could and couldn’t wear to school—no torn jeans, no beer shirts, and certainly nothing revealing. School was treated as my job when I was a teenager and I was expected to dress appropriately. And, I wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing a tube top or something like that to school. I would have been far too embarrassed. Nor did I feel compelled to dress No girls that I went to school with would have dressed so provocatively. (Incidentally, you will NEVER see me in anything where my stomach will show. Pregnancy does some not-so-pretty things to a woman’s body and it apparently takes a while to recover.)

I blame the Britney Spears’ and the Christina Aguilera’s of today’s world and lazy parenting for the slutty dressing phenomenon that seems to have plagued teenage girls. MTV (and for that matter, TV in general) is jam-packed with gyrating women wearing next to nothing who solicit and get all kinds of attention from very attractive men. And these are the role models for our girls? We’re teaching our girls that if they wear trampy outfits and act like sex kittens, they can get any boy they want.

I’m sounding like I’m ultra-conservative and I think all girls should wear turtlenecks and flannel pants to school. That’s not the case. The thing that gets me is that there seems to be a total lack of self-respect among these girls. Has society bashed girls down to such a level that they feel the only way to attract attention is to show some skin? Does a girl these days base her self-worth on how many boys want to “get with” her? Either way, it seems to me that there should be more of a focus on helping girls gain brain power so she can go to college or enter the workforce and become independent.

A girl shouldn’t have to feel like she has to put her body on display to be beautiful. A girl can be beautiful in a t-shirt and jeans if she has an air of confidence about her. She needs to know that there is so much more to her than how her body looks in a tank top. She has so much more to offer than her body. Those of us that are moms need to teach our daughters to respect themselves and to place a high value on what’s inside versus what can be easily seen.