I've been hearing a variation on this theme with increasing frequency in my office. Mothers voice distress over the suggestive clothing their teen and preteen daughters are wearing, inside and outside the house. In fact, conflict over clothing is what prompts them to come in for family therapy. The daughters themselves may be imperious or sullen, but almost all employ the everyone-is-doing-it excuse. And an awful lot of girls are doing it.

Women once complained about being reduced to sex objects. Now, their daughters are volunteering to be sex objects. And while parents register disapproval, they often fail to take action. In that failure, they unwittingly place their daughters at risk by allowing them to bypass girlhood. When a daughter moves straight from little girl to woman, she's playing a role rather than gradually learning to live her own life. These girls may seem whole, but they aren't. There is often a lost girl inside.

Many who endorse provocative styles of dress have picked up on the liberal message of the '60s and taken it a step further. They see those who express distaste over the sexually explicit as hung up, old-fashioned. One young woman pointed out to me, "It's almost politically incorrect to say that something is inappropriate."

For men, their hormones automatically react to changes in the environment and can be tough to control too! They see a female dressed in a provocative manner and their autonomous nervous system kicks in. They're aroused. Not because they want to be, but because their bodies automatically release hormones that cause the arousal. God has given men this reaction to help insure the survival of the human race, but they have to control it and use it for the purpose God intended.

Men cannot control the fact that arousal has happened, but they do have control over how they will respond to it! Will they turn their eyes away and fire a quick prayer to Heaven? Or will they succumb to lustful thoughts.

Can we say "it's his problem, not mine"?1

My younger sister told me a story about visiting the home of friends when the teenage daughter's date arrived. The daughter came downstairs in a T-shirt that read, "Strippers do it with poles." The parents seemed nonplussed; it was the boy who said to them, "You're letting her go out of the house in that ?"

When I see little kids dressed like vamps, I'm reminded of the words of author Marie Winn in her 1981 book "Children Without Childhood": "The age of protection has ended." She described the research of the Austrian animal behaviorist Konrad Lorenz regarding what he called neotenic characteristics in the young of various species and the purpose they serve. In children, these characteristics include outsized heads and eyes, and short, rounded bodily proportions. Lorenz hypothesized that these traits function as built-in "releasing mechanisms," eliciting nurturing, protective responses from adults.

Parents -- sometimes without even realizing it -- put their daughters at risk when they camouflage these features by allowing them to dress in adult ways. Such dress prompts the child to imitate adult female behavior that she doesn't understand. This can short-circuit normal development. It can also encourage older children and adults to relate to these young girls as sexual beings, sometimes with tragic consequences.

We were sitting at mass behind a family whose sixteen or seventeen year old daughter was dressed in a tight, short sleeveless dress with a plunging neckline and no back.

We were doing the sign of peace, and my son was going down the line of the family saying "peace be with you", "peace be with you", "peace be with you" and when he got to the girl, his eyes widened, and he made a motion like licking his hand and slicking down his hair and he said: "Woah, baby!". I was cracking up, but her dad wasn't amused.