Parenting Advice From Joy Berry: Overreacting to Matters Involving Human Sexuality

Talk about overreacting!

I’m sure that by now most people have heard about the plight of the Demaree family who took a memory stick containing 144 family photos to Wal-Mart to get them developed. Included in the huge batch of photos were 11 shots taken of the Demaree children during bathtime.

I have a hunch what these photos were like, because similar photos are strewn throughout my kids’ photo albums. And according to the parents that I have been talking to, they have the same kind of photos in their family albums. In fact, many of us recall the proverbial professional photos of yesteryear when tots were photographed naked on bearskin rugs.

In the context of 144 photos—most of which were of the family’s vacation—it’s difficult for me to believe that there were not some important clues regarding whether or not AJ and Lisa Demaree were exploiting their children for pornographic purposes.

I can’t emphasize enough how thankful I am that the powers that be are taking the matter of juvenile pornography seriously. It truly is a huge problem that needs to be addressed aggressively and continuously. However, this should never give license to people with authority checking their common sense at the door when evaluating which situations to pursue.

The danger of overreacting to situations such as the one in which the Demarees took photos of their children in and around bathtime goes beyond the trauma that the entire family sustained. It threatens all of the progress we have made toward helping kids develop positive body images and attitudes about their sexuality.

This whole episode harkened back to my strict childhood in which I was instructed to never look at my private parts, let alone touch them. Great pains were taken to show me how to use a washcloth and never my hand when “washing down below.” And greater pains were taken to insure that I was supervised at all times so that something so “unacceptable” would never happen.

Anyone who has endured this kind of negative indoctrination knows how damaging such a Victorian introduction to human sexuality can have on a young child. In the end, it was extremely counterproductive—especially given the expectation that young women should be able to simply switch on their sexuality when it became necessary to please their husbands.

The human body is a beautiful thing and anything that might cause a child to think differently is simply unacceptable. Hopefully the threat of having one’s children removed from one’s home for a month, losing one’s job for a year, and being placed on the sexual offenders registry for taking bathtime photos was a horrendous fluke and not a trend.