While volunteering for a day camp in Philadelphia on my mission trip, I encountered some big personalities in the children I was responsible for watching in one day. To respect the privacy of the young girl I spent the day with, I'll call her Anna. I watched a group of seven and eight year olds with a couple of other missioners and Anna instantly attached to me. The group of roughly fifteen kids sat around a table and stated their name, age, and a fun fact. The boys sitting next to me talked about how they had a girlfriend (which is questionable, because the kids debated over whether or not this was true), and as they stated that they liked this or that, one girl grinned and quietly said her name and that her fun fact was that she had a boyfriend.

Now, normally I think I might have found this cute, but the timing was impeccable. I had just broken up with my boyfriend of one year and was struggling to feel like a whole person again. I had based a portion of my self worth off of our relationship, and spent a majority of my time with him, and otherwise texting him. None of this is his fault, but I personally was not fully myself when we began dating my senior year of high school. Our relationship allowed me to bury the fact that I had a lot of self loving to learn. Once we broke up, I had to get used to being alone again. Like, really alone yet with myself. I was also halfway through reading Half The Sky, a book about the issues of sex trafficking and how people have helped and how we can help. The book touches on how women are made to feel as though they must be docile and accompanied by a male in order to be whole, and how that's how men continue oppressing women.

So, in this light, hearing the girls at the table say they had boyfriends at seven years old, or that they really, really wanted a boyfriend, shattered something in me. They also said they couldn't read, which is another issue entirely, but the priorities imprinted on our children by media is really reflected in what our kids say. I say 'our kids' because I don't have, nor probably will never have kids, but as the older generations we have a responsibility to each and every kid to raise them up to their fullest potential and level the playing field for minorities. These where also children living near or below the poverty line, so for the girls to be some of the most vulnerable American citizens and not have access to adequate education is another issue within this. I feel strongly that our media needs to begin portraying women as individuals, and not accompanied by a male counterpart. The media also has a responsibility to begin showing strong female friendships on top of that.

That being said, Anna was eager to learn and that's enough to leave me with some hope that her potential won't be completely side tracked.