Have you ever noticed the messages you give your child without meaning to? In this piece, part of our positive parenting series, mum and blogger Lynn Morrison shares her thoughts on beauty, bodies, and the words we use in front of our kids.
“Mummy, come quick!” my daughter shouts at me from the upstairs bathroom. I fly into the room expecting to find a child half-drowned in the bathtub. Instead I find my five and a half year old standing on the stepping stool, staring at her underwear-clad body in the mirror.
“I tilted it down and now I can see my whole body,” she exclaims, twisting side to side and smiling at her reflection. She flexes her arm and comments on her growing muscle. “I’m super strong.”
To my eyes, she is perfect. She is perfect in her own eyes too.
Someday, though, someone will tell her that she isn’t. As this thought crosses my mind, I feel the anger of a thousand voices welling up inside me. Someone is going to come and tell my perfect child that her feet are too big, or that she has her father’s nose. They’ll look at her skinny torso and suggest she eat more, or look at her little thighs and suggest she eat less. Someone, one day, is going to change the way my daughter sees herself forever.
As she sashays in front of the mirror, my mind races as I try to work out who it might be.
She has a gaggle of girlfriends at school, and some of them have older sisters. Will it be one of them? It’s hard to imagine.
She’s at the age where the worst insult possible is “I won’t be your best friend ever again” — a crisis usually resolved within twenty-four hours. Telling one another “I don’t like the way you look” isn’t even in their vocabulary yet.
It won’t be the TV. The characters she watches are drawn as kids, not as bodies to be judged. No, I don’t think the confidence-sucking body image doubts are going to come in through the television.
I step over to my gorgeous child and give her a hug. “Look at us, Mummy,” she says, pointing up towards the mirror. I look up and absentmindedly start fingering the greys in my hair. As she primps and poses, I frown and poke at the bags under my eyes and try to smooth my forehead. I hear a giggle and turn to see my daughter copying my faces. Then she looks over at me and says, “Mummy, you’re beautiful.”
It turns out I’m the problem. I’m the one teaching her what society thinks. I’m the one introducing the unkind thoughts. She tells me to flex, and I start moaning about arm fat. She tells me to wear my black trousers, and I say my bum looks too big in them. She says, “You’re beautiful, Mummy!” and I say no, and start listing my faults instead. I will be the one to tell her that her definition of beauty is wrong. I’ll be the one who gets her second-guessing herself. I’ll be the one who brings the magazine-cover idea of attractive into the house and shows her, day after day, every way I don’t measure up to it.
“I want to grow up and look just like you, Mummy.”
She isn’t seeing the same person I see — a tired, middle-aged mum who constantly belittles herself. She wants to look like the wild-haired person she sees, who scares away anything scary, holds her close, and showers her with love and affection.
I make a conscious choice to claw the negative thoughts right out of my head. I will not be the one who chips away at her self-confidence. I won’t subject her to a death by a thousand cuts — the never-ending stream of judgement and doubt that so often runs through my own.
I will wake up tomorrow and tell her that we are beautiful. And I will do it again, day after day after day, until I believe it as firmly as she does. Someday, someone may tell her that she isn’t perfect. But I promise you this: that person will not be me.
This article by Lynn Morrison first appeared on her blog, The Nomad Mom Diary, and is reproduced with kind permission. Lynn is an American raising two daughters with her Italian husband in Oxford, England.
Over to you now — what do you think about the messages we pass on to our kids about beauty and bodies? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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