HotmailBody image: Like mother, like daughter
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I imagine there’s not a woman reading this who can’t remember at least one time when her mom forced her to wear something she remembers as truly horrific (for me, it was a fake-fur white hood that buttoned under the chin, which prompted my brothers to call me a sheep and make “baa” noises whenever I wore it). When we insist that our daughters look a certain way — whether it’s what they wear, how their hair looks, or how they have to behave in what they’re wearing — we’re building the foundation for how they see their bodies and the importance of how they look.
When I became a mom myself, I soon learned that although my little girl wanted to please me, she also had a mind of her own. She liked to choose her own outfits and preferred dresses; she balked at the adorable little matching pants-and-shirts combinations I picked out for her. My mother, an avid seamstress, had made a few jumpers for Faith, and Faith wanted to wear them all the time. My inner feminist worried that the dresses would interfere with her running, climbing, and playing. So we compromised: For almost a year, Faith wore a dress over her pants and shirt — even as she made mud pies in the backyard and wrestled with her brother. Somewhere, there’s a great family photo of her in a football jersey and a white tutu. I love that picture. For me, it’s the ultimate portrait of what being a little girl means — moving between the glamour of grown-up ladies and the rough-and-tumble action of exploring the world.
Who wants to grow up?
Ever remember your mom telling you to “act like a lady”? I was at a kid’s birthday party recently where a little girl in a beautiful frilly dress was enjoying the breeze she made as she spun and spun, her dress flying up, not a care in the world. I’ll never forget the look on her face as her mother took her by the arm, told her to stop, and informed her that “nice girls don’t do that.”
Later, as the cake was cut, the grown-up women inevitably began to discuss calorie counts and how they “really shouldn’t” have a piece. For the little girls in the room who were watching, the lesson was that “acting like a lady” means you don’t get cake — not a whole lot of incentive to grow up there! Or if you do take a piece, being a grown-up lady means you spend the next twenty minutes talking about how you don’t deserve cake because your thighs are already too big.
What’s the real effect? I’ve been guilty of thinking that those kinds of comments go right over my daughter’s head — or that she gets the “joke” — but the reality is our girls don’t, especially if they hear us talking that way frequently. One isolated remark here or there about your body probably isn’t going to damage your daughter, but when mothers repeatedly make negative comments about their bodies, it creates a model for how daughters feel about themselves, says Andrea Vazzana, PhD, a clinical psychologist practicing at the NYU Child Study Center. She’s seen it play out in her practice: Mothers who constantly talk about their bodies send a message to their daughters that physical appearance is important. And when mothers talk about their dissatisfaction with their bodies, daughters can come to think that feeling bad about their bodies is the norm, putting them at higher risk for developing similar feelings and for making negative comments about their own bodies.
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It might sound extreme, I know, but offhand comments like these and our own behavior toward our bodies have a profound effect on our girls. “My mom says her bum is too big,” Kelly, age fourteen, says. “She exercises a lot, and she doesn’t eat desserts. I hate it when she tells me my jeans are too tight.”
Who among us can’t remember a time when someone — if it wasn’t a mom, maybe it was a grandma, an aunt, an uncle, or another “well-meaning” relative — said something that made us all of a sudden feel not quite right, often related to a body part that we supposedly “got” from someone else in the family? Ever been told you have your mom’s distinctively rounded bottom or your grandma’s knobby knees? I’m willing to bet you never looked at those body parts the same way after that.
When you fixate out loud on some physical part that you don’t like about yourself, whether it’s your thighs, your nose, your middle, or any body part you imagine to be your most grotesque flaw, you may be teaching your daughter that the whole package of “who we are” doesn’t matter. Instead, we teach them to pick themselves apart and dissect their flaws as we’ve done to ourselves. We teach them to imagine that other people look at them and see only the things they don’t like about themselves. And we teach them not to trust their own judgment about what beauty really is.
“I’m really self-conscious about certain things, and a lot of times I only talk about it with friends I have that sort of think the same thing about the way they look,” says Amanda. “I would [like to] lose some weight. I mean, I wouldn’t make myself super-skinny — just average-sized. Also, I’d want to be a bit shorter. I’m not a huge fan of how tall I am.”
Excerpted from “You'd Be So Pretty If...” by Dara Chadwick. Copyright (c) 2009. reprinted with permission from Perseus Books. For more on this book, click here.
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