How to make sure your daughters know they’re beautiful:
by, someone who has no experience having daughters, but a lot of experience having great parents.
Honestly- so I’m hoping they’re going to be the bigger person here and not say they told me so- looking back, a lot of things that my parents did that annoyed me to no end are the things that made me confident in who I am today.
I have no idea if my parents did all of this on purpose, or if some things they did without thinking just worked out well, but I do know that they’re things I’m going to be doing on purpose.
What have most of these posts focused on? That beauty is love, beauty is confidence in yourself, beauty is knowing that you are loved and can love, beauty is knowing that you are loved by God. This is so true, and so beautiful- but how, how, can we make sure that we pass these truths on to our friends and family? How do we make sure that someday, our children know it?
So many people are wounded today because, growing up, they were never told or taught that they were beautiful, or were even told that they weren’t. While I can’t say I thought I was pretty every waking moment of my life, or that I’ve never wanted to change anything about my body, I can say that I really always was able to know- not necessarily feel, but know- that no matter what, I was beautiful. Even if I hadn’t showered in a few days because the shower’s solar heater had kicked it, and I had just spent five hours hiking up a volcano in the pitch black and was covered in dirt and sweat, I was beautiful. Actually, especially because I could be gross, dirty, tired, sweaty, and smelly on a mountaintop in Guatemala, happy and having just accomplished something brand new. That’s how my parents raised me, and this is more or less, I think, how they did it:
-For the love of God, tell your daughters they’re beautiful! But not only that they’re beautiful.
I’m lucky enough to have family members who did tell me that I was beautiful, or that I was pretty, etc, when I was little. There’s a problem with this though: girls are under so much pressure to be physically beautiful that hearing this can make them want to seek out that same reinforcement more and more. Am I pretty? Do I look good? What if I do this? Am I pretty now? Or am I prettier like this? The physical is emphasized too much in our society. It shouldn’t be completely ignored, and hearing that they’re beautiful is important for little girls. But always, always, make sure they know that they are more than just pretty. Ask a little girl: what book are you reading? What’s your favorite game to play? What’s your favorite movie? Ask her to draw a picture with you and say “Wow, you’re a great artist!”
And don’t tell your daughters they look beautiful just when they actually look pretty- if I was little and ran up to my dad on the beach with a seaweed wig on my head and sand-mud warpaint all over me and said “DADDY DON’T I LOOK PRETTY?” he would’ve said “You’re beautiful!” or, “You’re the prettiest sad monster ever.” Make sure beautiful means more than just the mirror: strong is beautiful, smart is beautiful, stubborn can be beautiful. So show that, always.
-Teach them modesty- for the right reasons, in the right ways. But also how to not wear a potato sack, and like clothes for the sake of feeling good and having fun with them.
My parents had rules on rules on rules about what we could and couldn’t wear, or it felt like it at the time. Some of them I hated. Some of them were just fine. All of them boiled down to something very simple: respect for yourself, and respect for the situation you’re in. For example:
There were most definitely clothes that I would never be allowed out of my house in. Granted, in middle and high school this didn’t always mean I never wore them- I wasn’t above the occasional “change-for-the-dance-at-a-
However, having basic rules and standards of decency doesn’t mean decide what your kids will wear and tell them what to do. It means if your daughter wants to read The Babysitters Club and draw her style inspiration from Claudia Kishi because the author gives her really good adjectives like “sophisticated” and “funky”, and because she would always do cool things like wear crazy colors and homemade accessories.... Tell her she looks good when she matches a shoulder sash/belt/thing she made out of multicolored fabric with her pink shorts overalls at the family reunion. My mom did. (it was the 90s... I was young, people. Single-digit ages. And I looked darn good.) If I wanted to get that Old Navy dress in a bight purple that made me feel pretty my mom hated, but it was otherwise a fine dress, she let me go ahead and feel pretty in a purple that hurt her eyes. I learned that yes, clothes are important for outwardly showing the kind of person you are, so you should be careful in how you present yourself- but also that you can and should have fun with what you wear and do things that make you feel confident!
When I was older, maybe later elementary school, or preteen, I remember one day while my family was at the Jersey Shore in the summer. We were walking on the boardwalk, and we went by one of those gangs of young teen girls who hang out on malls, beaches, and boardwalks waiting for a gang of teen boys to come talk to them. I distinctly remember my dad saying to me, “you know, you don’t have to wear that much makeup or that little clothing to make boys like you. You’re beautiful anyway.” I don’t know if he remembers saying that to me, but I do remember that a few years later, mid-high school, that moment popped into my head while I was getting ready to go hang out on the boardwalk with my cousins. I ended up changing what I had originally put on, because he was right. The little things you do to reinforce this all make a big difference- what was probably just a passing comment by my dad is something that I still remember today. So make sure the little things you say are things that will build your daughters up and reinforce what you want them to believe about their beauty and worth, not undermine it.
-Let them be kids, for Pete’s sake. And sometimes, that means make them be kids.
I REALLY WANTED to wear makeup to school in fourth grade. Like, I really wanted to. Because I.... wanted to.... because.... for some reason... I even had a really, really high quality makeup kit that I got off the rack next to the squirt guns at Richdales.
Yeah um, Mom... thank you for not actually letting me go out with that heinous makeup job on. Yes, I really did want to wear it, but not because I liked makeup, or was even remotely good at using it. I just wanted to feel “like a grown-up” because, clearly, in fourth grade you’re totally almost a grownup. Not.
I can give absolutely zero parenting tips on how to say no to kids without them being very difficult about it, other than “have kids less stubborn than I am.” But I can tell you that there’s an immense pressure on girls especially to grow up way, way too fast, and even though I complained at the time, my parents refusing to let me act more grown up until I was actually ready made sure that I was comfortable with who I am and what I was doing, not just doing something because other people were doing it or it was cool. This example may sound like it has nothing to do with beauty other than the makeup example, but it’s about creating confidence to make your own choices and decisions and be secure in them, and that is a beautiful thing. (This confidence will also give you the ability to say “excuse me, no, you know what? I am beautiful” if anyone tries to tell you otherwise.)
Make sure your daughters read!
I love, and have always loved, reading. I feel like this saved my parents a lot of headaches when I was little, because apparently, parents worry a lot about the messages their daughters pick up from seemingly harmless kids’ shows. I know this must be true, because the mom blog I read for recipes says so. I honestly have no idea what kids watch on Disney Channel now, but we had Hannah Montana, iCarly, and the first seasons of that show with Selena Gomez on it and something about magic. Hannah Montana is engaged now, so that shows how far out of it I am when it comes to Disney channel... It is true though that these shows all had, and newer ones still have, one main character who is the ideal that girls feel like they’re supposed to be like- yes, in personality, but especially in looks and mannerisms.
A book is different. Yes, you know what characters look like, but you get to shape them in your mind and fill out the unknowns however you want. Huge benefits in imagination abilities aside, reading lets you create a world that you are comfortable in. A little girl might still want to model herself after a character in a book (see Claudia Kishi and strange funky clothes example above) but in a book, there is much more than physical appearance to aspire to.
There are tens of other things my parents did to make sure I grew up confident and beautiful, but I probably don’t even know what half of them are. I just hope someday I can do enough of them to ensure that my daughters can be loving, beautiful women, and secure and confident enough to recognize that in themselves and show it to others. If they’re anywhere near as stubborn as I was about it, though, my parents might actually get some cause to say “I told you so.”
Patty is a junior at George Washington University studying International Affairs in Washington D.C. She doesn't blog, but is a wonderful writer and maintains the tumblr for Made In His Image.
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