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The Olympics are always an exciting time, to see those teenagers and early adults become the best in the world. It's awe-inspiring.

I want to do that! Ainsley said about her newest Heroine Gou Jing Jing.

Those children train every day from the time they are 3 years old for hours and hours. They don't go to regular school, they practice and practice and practice every single day. Their parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on training, I told her.

Oh, I don't want to do that, she said.

All that sacrifice - of youth, of fun, of childhood - makes me want to cry when one of them gets injured at the last minute and can't compete, like poor Chellsie Memmel whose ankle was injured and then she fell from the parallel bars during the qualifying round.

Listening to the bios you realize that, at least at first, shooting for the Olympics is a parental dream. Or, in the case of China, the State's dream.

Some of the Chinese girls were required to leave their family lives to train for the Olympics because they were inherently extra bendy and flexible or showed innate swimming skills when young.

Some say this is unfair, but my husband says, they were saved from a life of being farm or factory workers.

He has a point.

Some of the American athletes have parents who were Olympians. Mom or Dad won Gold - talk about pressure.

On the bios I heard that many of these teenage girls left their homes to train and one admitted that she has no friends outside the team.

What do you think? Does watching the Olympics make you want to sign your kid up for some hard core training?

I'd like a better idea of who my audience is and what YOU want from this site.

I won a blog critique from Chris G at chrisg.com. If the co-author of theProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income tells you to move your site and give it a makeover - well, you do it. Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me is going to be redesigned soon.

This is your opportunity to tell me what you would like to see more of or less of.

What kind of design?

What kind of content?

Yesterday, we discussed Self-Objectification and Low Self-Esteem.

I loath problems without solutions and complaints that make us feel powerless. So, here's a list of 10 Antidotes to Self-Objectification and Sexualization of Girls.

* Media Literacy - talk to girls about the images they see. Point it out when there is obvious digital retouching like in Keira Knightly Stands Up for Her Girls and Yours.
Watch Dove's Onslaught campaign with her and discuss it. If it's age-appropriate take her to the Natural Breast Gallery and talk about how different the images of women in media are than the bodies of real women. Tell her about Photoshop and discuss the motives of the media to sell products by misrepresenting women's bodies.

* Athletics - A focus on the body that is nonsexual, athletics focuses on competency, agency and action. As participation in sports increases, participation in risky sexual-activity decreases. Taekwondo and soccer are good choices. The report sites cheerleading and dance as less empowering types of athletics due to the focus on appearance, sexiness, and thinness.

* Extracurricular Activities - Girl Scouts, band, after-school programs like Girls Inc., drama club, band, computer or video gaming clubs give girls an alternative to activities that focus on their appearance.

* Comprehensive Sexuality Education - "A central way to help youth counteract distorted views presented by the media and culture about girls, sex and the sexualization of girls is comprehensive sex education. Programs must include accurate information about reproduction and contraception, the importance of delaying intercourse initiation for young people, and the building of communication skills, and promotes a notion of sexual responsibility that includes respect for oneself and an emphasis on consensual, non-exploitative sexual activity."

* Co-Viewing Media with Parents - Parental comment on media children are exposed to is key to altering the influence of the messages. Watch TV with girls and comment on the messages. Contradict stereo-typical behavior when you see it, share your insights on advertising and media. Co-viewing also reduces the amount of inappropriate material children see.

* Religion, Spirituality and Meditation - organized religious and other ethical instruction actively combat the values conveyed by popular culture. When parents teach girls they are "more than their bodies" girls benefit. Talk to your kids about your idea of her whole self, and that "who they are" makes them valuable outside of their sexuality or gender roles. Insisting that girls remain girls and not be pushed into a precocious sexuality is something many churches do. Encourage meditation, yoga, tai chi, and prayer to teach girls to get in touch with their bodies and themselves as spiritual beings.

* Activism by Parents and Families - encourage girls to become their own activists by being one yourself. Join Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood to fight sexualizing and objectifying messages in marketing. Get involved in The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media. Take your daughter to a Dove BodyTalk, Campaign for Real Beauty Self Esteem Workshop. Sign your daughter up for the Girl Scouts Uniquely Me program.

* Alternative Media - Cancel the Tiger Beat subscription and subscribe to Girl Zone. Get your daughter involved in writing or producing her own media - a website or blog is simple enough. Stone Soup is a literary magazine written by children. Write your daughter a book about her. Most digital photography websites like Mypublisher.com will allow you to publish a storybook about your daughter, using images of her, in a beautiful hardbound book for $30. Throw out the Disney Princess books and videos and get some empowering alternatives like Princess Bubble.

* Confront Your Body Issues - If you, the mother, have a history of self-objectification or poor body image confront it and deal with it before you pass it down. Refuse to self-deprecate or equate your own value to how thin you are or how you look.

* Be The Empowered Woman - If you find yourself buying into gender-stereotypes in your own life, being too passive, not saying "no", holding yourself to an impossible standard of perfection, running yourself ragged to be everything to everyone - Stop It. She will emulate you. A mother who radiates self-love and self-acceptance vaccinates her daughter against a low self-esteem, said Naomi Wolf.

Compiled from the APA Report on Sexualization of Girls and articles originally published on Empowering Girls: So Sioux Me.

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We all know how objectification works, some men see women as an object for their sexual pleasure.

But, what happens when girls and women begin to see themselves as an object for men's sexual pleasure?

The Association for the American Psychological Association
(APA) calls this self-objectification and/or self-sexualization in the Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls.

There's a host of evidence that when girls are exposed to too much media that they begin to view themselves less as three dimensional human beings and more as sexual objects. When this occurs, psychologists note the increase of:

* eating disorders

* low self-esteem

* depression or depressed mood

One interesting study noted that teenage girls from Figi had great body image and self esteem - until they were exposed to Western television. Once exposed, they became preoccupied with weight and body shape, purging behavior (throwing up) and body disparagement. Prior to television the Figian culture emphasized a robust body shape and based notions of identity not on body, but on family, community and relationships. The transition between healthy self-image to the increase of eating disorders was only 3 years.

Self-objectification is also directly linked to "diminished sexual health" among adolescent girls. One study found that when girls viewed their own bodies as objects for male pleasure condom use and sexual assertiveness, (saying "no") decreased.

Another study found that "undergraduate women who frequently watched music videos or read women's magazines, who attribute greater realism to media content, or who identify strongly with popular TV characters were also more accepting of sexually objectifying notions of women."

Accepting these sexually stereotypical and objectifying views manifested in negative attitudes toward breastfeeding and negative attitudes about normal body functions like menstruation and sweating.

When I read the APA's definition of self-objectification and self-sexualization it was like a mini-awakening for me.

That explains why, as a teen and young adult, I allowed boyfriends to treat me as their sexual object or plaything. It explains why I crossed many of my own sexual boundaries and didn't want to object "for fear of being rude" on several occasions. It explains why I allowed boys and men to make inappropriate comments about my body and its development from even the earliest age - heck, I didn't even know was "allowed to object."

Do you think you've ever self-sexualized or self-objectified?

Do you worry about this with your daughter?

Read 10 Antidotes to Self-Objectification and Sexualization of Girls for ways to prevent your daughter from objectifying her own body.

Empowering Girls: Marketing Boundaries

APA Reports Sexualization of Girls Devastating
Taekwondo For Girl Power

The greatest gift a parent can give a child, Tracee, is the ability to become independently happy.

And the greatest gift a child can give a parent is exercising that ability.

An email affermation/meditiation from Tut.com

I'd settle for that and call it parenting success.