Is your nine-year-old at the waxing salon?

 When I was at primary school, the worst indignities you could suffer were bowl hair cuts inflicted on you by your mum, hand-knitted jumpers that were forced onto you for school camp and the horror of having your uniform flip over your head on the monkey bars.
 Fast-forward to 2011, and as my local newspaper reported recently, children as young as nine are being taken for waxing treatments and there is an increase in depression and anxiety and eating disorders in children as young as five in the playground. Now, aside from medical reasons that may make very hirsuite girls the subject of teasing, can there really be a need for a nine-year-old to have her legs waxed? I cannot think of a single reason.
 It is bad enough shaving your legs for the rest of your adult life, but to start before you have even hit puberty strikes me as dangerous on every level.  First there is the sexualisation concern. If a girl of nine is already worried about looking like a hair-free, grown-up woman, then surely that opens her up to an entire ream of potential evils. 
 Where does it stop? Make-up, padded underwear, early sexual experimentation and early comparisons with models in magazines? Can’t we just let them be kids?