Did you know that we’re not supposed to tell our daughters that they’re pretty? Apparently, this is a Thing. It all started when I saw an article shared in my newsfeed on Facebook. It was titled, “Four reasons not to tell your daughter she’s pretty.” I was flabbergasted. What is wrong with telling your daughter she’s pretty? So I headed over to Google, and what do you know? There are apparently a lot of people who feel this way.
So I scrolled through a few of the posts. The reasoning tended to be similar among all of them: you don’t want your daughter to be too focused on beauty. You don’t want her to think that her worth is based on her looks. And — my favorite — if she is too focused on being pretty, then she won’t be interested in STEM fields. Because no attractive woman ever loved science or math, amiright?? To all of this, I have one thing to say: Screw. That.
I am always going to tell my daughters that they’re beautiful. I have two little girls, and I tell them they’re pretty every day. When they wake up in the morning, I ask how my beautiful girls are. When I put Clara in a pretty dress for church, I tell her she looks pretty. Ivy is a typical girl and therefore absolutely loves accessories, so whenever she runs over to me to show off her newest style creation — anything from wearing socks as opera gloves to putting an actual hair bow in her hair — I tell her she looks pretty. I’m never going to stop doing that. Ever. They may not understand right now, but these are things that I want them, and need them, to hear, lessons I hope they learn. You are beautiful. You are cherished. You are loved.
Telling my daughters they’re pretty doesn’t mean that they won’t be interested in things like STEM fields. Putting them in pretty dresses doesn’t mean they can’t play outside and get dirty, either. (Just ask Ivy, who will tackle the muddiest mud puddle while wearing a princess dress with unabashed enthusiasm.) Hearing their parents tell them how beautiful they are does not make little girls become hyper-focused on beauty unless that’s all you’re teaching them… and last I checked, there are very few parents who literally teach their daughters that their value is wrapped up in their appearance, or that liking princess dresses and hairbows means that they can’t also like learning about science or math.
What does happen, however, is that our girls grow up and enter a society that is just dying to tell them how ugly they are. Even before they’re teenagers, they will see magazine covers with airbrushed celebrities and models and see that this is what society says is beautiful: unattainable perfection, created on a computer. They will get older and wonder why they don’t have a thigh gap. They’ll think their boobs are too small (or too big). Their lips aren’t full enough. Their hair is too thin, their waist too thick. It won’t matter if our girls grow up to be Cindy freaking Crawford 2.0. It is never good enough. And we’re supposed to send our daughters into that lion’s den without them ever hearing that someone thinks they’re beautiful?
These people who hate the idea of girls being told that they’re pretty need not fear. There are plenty of people just eager to tell girls how ugly they are. I’m curious what these pretty-haters do in these situations, when their teenage daughter is crying in their arms because someone at school told her that she’s ugly. Do they shrug their shoulders and just agree? Do they say, “Yeah, but you’re really smart?” And what do they think will happen to these girls, the ones whose parents never tell them they’re pretty? They’ll find someone who will tell them how beautiful they are, and vulnerable girls with low self-esteem are scarily easy to manipulate and use.
Just because I tell my daughters that they’re beautiful doesn’t mean that I can’t give them other compliments as well. There seems to be this line of thought that if you tell your daughters that they’re pretty, you aren’t telling them anything else. But here in reality, where I like to live, I’m allowed to give my kids as many compliments as I want. I can tell my daughters that they’re pretty, and smart, and funny, and tough, and brave… there’s really no limit.
I want my daughters to know that they are beautiful, both inside and out. I want them to grow up, confident in and assured of our love for them. I don’t want them to grow up and find it easy to believe someone who tells them that they’re too fat, or too skinny, or too ugly because they’ve never been told that they are perfect and lovely and beautiful. Robbing them of that assurance in the name of some kind of warped sense of self-esteem building is not going to help them navigate an image-obsessed society. And there needs to be someone who can be their soft place to land when the cruelty of our culture inevitably knocks them down. So I don’t care what anyone says: I will always tell my daughters that they’re beautiful.
