I think you make an excellent point to pick out how these parents are using their children. It seems like human societies everywhere, and for all of recorded history, have demonstrated some kind of appreciation for the necessity of caution we apply approaching the transition from childhood to sexual maturity (not just the bodily transition, but the psychological one). Sensible people have always recognized a kind of pristine quality that accompanies our pre-sexual life, because deep down we all know that the entrance into sexual life is something like our banishment from the Garden (Paradise). Sex is one of the fundamental stresses and traumas of mankind, an echo of the very first trauma of being born. It's the point at which fear and insecurity enter most people's lives (if they've had a safe childhood). Once we are sexual, we know that we are judged performatively. The judgment of the parents which had preoccupied us like the god of our world diffuses and becomes the judgment of everybody around us. People who care about children have always strived to protect them from this, within reason, and preserve for as long as it is appropriate the naive pre-sexual state. We know it limits our world to begin seeing it through the sexual self. Why - fucking why - are people like this beginning to insist on thrusting three and four year old children into sexual consciousness? I'm serious. What is the actual fucking reason? Why would you want to steal this part of life from a child? Imagine that as someone in middle-life, you could press your thumb to the forehead of a sixteen year-old kid and immediately transmit to them the understanding you have of life and the world at, say, age fifty. If you loved them, you'd never do this. By middle age, most of us have grown more cynical. We've run into the limitations of the world and the cruder realities of life. But we wouldn't want to squelch that beautiful kind of hope, that looking-forward-to-ness that young people have which is the kind of forward momentum that encourages a person to pursue work, get married, and to start families. You could imagine yourself at that age, beginning your life project with the kind of cynicism of the world you have today, from 35 years on, or so. I think society might collapse. In some sense, we have to believe our cultural myths, our mind has to be unlimited to certain extents at certain ages, and those possibilities close according to some age-appropriate arc. I think it is the same idea as it concerns sex, which impresses on us this desperate question: why? Fucking why? I don't think these parents see the irony of intervening in the mental development of a child by inserting these concepts - they aren't opening the child's mind to naturally forming a relationship with being in the world - no, they are setting early concrete footers and dividing walls. Why are we trying to fundamentally advance the arc of maturity, to sexualize and make cynics out of children? To transfer the resentments and philosophical troubles of adult life onto children? It just seems so abundantly suicidal.