Little Girls and Beauty

Good topic, soz. My little girl is just now starting to insist on picking her own clothes. Anymore I have to have her input on what I buy her because sometimes she just takes a dislike to something and refuses to wear it.

That said, I have always been (perhaps overly) concerned that she would be bombarded by the Barbie marketing and get too hung up on her looks. She's drawn to the princessy things (movies, stories, clothes) more often than other things. Luckily for me, she's only three and still able to be distracted away from them. I definitely see where your concern is coming from.

The sozlet sounds like a real smarty pants. I think it's great that she is so creative about her clothes and even better that, through helping you make them yourself, she can learn to appreciate them for more than just how they will make her look.

I think she was about 5, maybe 4 when she received her first play make up. Basically she ends just making a mess out of her face, but she loves it. But it is strictly for play and like CJ she goes to a Christian school so no way could she wear make up to school. The uniform thing helps too as far as clothes.

I would be more worried if she starts to associate beauty with being good. Show her the Shrek movie – the ending theme is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The good hero/heroines are “ugly” and the villain is stressing things about beauty.

Sozobe -- Your description of the Sozlet's clothes fetish reminded me of two little children I knew very well. One is the smaller one of my two sisters, who at the age of five got infatuated with everything Turkish she picked up from her classmates in preschool. At one point, she spoke with a strong "Turkish" accent and insisted on wearing a head-scarf whenever she left the house. My mother, a staunch libertarian, hated the undercurrent of religious fundamentalism that came with the head scarf and tried to talk her out of it. Mom soon realized the futility of the excercise and gave up. My sister carried on for a few months, then found something else to get infatuated with.

The other is a son of a post-doc who worked at the institute where I was doing my Ph.D work. At some point -- I think he was six -- he decided he wanted to be a girl and wear a skirt in school. After an intense but short effort to talk him out of it, his parents reluctantly decided to let him wear a skirt in school, where he embarrassed himself considerably. He never wanted to be a girl again.

My interpretation is that children this age just like to use clothes to experiment with who they are, and how the rest of the world reacts to who they are. This experimentation comes with a risk of having the child's feeling hurt. Without having seen it, I still cringe a bit when I think of the boy's "I'm a girl" embarrassment in school because children can be cruel in situations like this. But even so, I guess your best bet is to just ride it out and let her experiment, as long as her physical health isn't at risk. I don't see anything in particular that you would have to fear from her overduing this particular spleen.

FreeDuck, Barbie marketing, yes, exactly. I'd put Disney Princess marketing in there too. Makes me itch, haven't sorted out how reasonable my dislike is.

One promising development -- sozlet is a very credulous commercial-watcher. She tells us that we should use Oxy and Clorox and such often, and assigns who should get a given product to almost every commercial she sees, whether herself or the roughest toughest boy in her preschool. (She's a bit wary of him, but when she sees "boyish" stuff like Ninja turtles or something she says, "Will would like that.") (Hmm, is this all about the gender roles, both directions? Her best friend until we moved was a boy and the gender role stuff was pretty fluid, maybe some things are getting reinforced in preschool.)

Anyway, a few days ago E.G. and sozlet were watching part of the first Harry Potter movie (before it got too scary), which had a bunch of spells in it. He explained to her that commercials are a kind of spell. They're trying to make her buy something, even if she doesn't really need it. "Sooooozzzzzllleeet.... buy thiiiissss!" <coupled with wiggly hand motions and intense eye contact.> She thought that was hilarious, but then we've been using it when she starts on one of her product endorsements again. That flustered her for a while, but it seems to have really worked. Just a bit ago, there was a commercial for some girl's clothes company, I forget who (Limited Too?) and she looked away pointedly and said "I don't want to watch this." I said, were they trying to put a spell on you? And she said "yes", ruefully.

$50 wouldn't be a lot of money for clothing here now, nimh. $150 for a season of clothes - you've got to be able to budget (which was what hamburger's purpose was with the clothing allowance). A decent pair of leather shoes for a tweenie - you're looking at $50 - $200 dollars if they're not on sale; a pair of jeans $50 - $200; a sweatshirt $20 - $100; a bathing suit $30 - $80.

Colleagues of mine report spending $400 - 600 a month on one child's clothing - and don't blink $200 on a pair of jeans for an 11 year-old Their kids won't wear things that are on sale - because they're not in style. Ack! Give 'em a budget. They'll learn right quick.


(Don't forget that $35 when you were 13 was likely a fair bit more than $50 now, in terms of purchasing power. )

Ohhh, I also had a head scarf wearing fetish for a bit in early public school. Also refused to answer to my given name in Grade 1 or 2 - insisted on using only my verra verra German middle name, which was not 'normal' in our school.

My best friend's son insisted on wearing pink shirts whenever he knew he'd be meeting someone new from age 3 - almost 8. He wanted to see the reactions - and knew he'd often get them.

Kids can be quite perverse at times. They 'know' what we want/expect/prefer much earlier than most of us realize. Button-pushing is a skill that seems to be developed at a very early age.

Haha, she indeed is cute Sozobe
Commercials can be a problem at times, as I found out
myself, as my daughter asked about the tampax commercials. That drew a long converation about sex education with it.

Little Jane was about 4 or 5 years old when she got
lipgloss - the flavored kind for children. She applied and
re-applied every 5 minutes and within 2 days the lipgloss
was empty. She got a new one once a month and gradually
learned to spread it out

That is hilarious. I don't often let my kids watch channels with commercials (thank God for the dvr) but when they do I hear a cacophony of "can you get me that?"s. I started telling them that the commercials are fake and that they just want to get the kids to give them the money from their piggy banks. If my son sees a cool toy car commercial I tell him "it doesn't really do that in real life", or for my daughter, "that doesn't sparkle in real life". They still ask for stuff but they seem to believe me when I say it's fake. I really like the spell idea, though, and I might have to borrow that technique.

Love the "spell" model of advertizing! Very observant, very comprehensible for little children, without any dumbing down of what advertizing does. I have to remember this line to use it on my own, yet-to-be-conceived, children.

Chapstick can be a lipstick substitute for indoor days when she's been Very Good. You're still facing a lot of Togetherness this winter.

Like the others said - hilarious, and clever!

I love the "spell" thing!

(Oh please let that work the next time Mo begs for Trix yogurt!)

I think sozelette may have a big future on one of the home shopping networks or with consumer reports. I guess it depends on whether she intends to use her talents for good or for evil...

BTW, Mo hates makeup. Makeup usually means I'm going somewhere without him.

Oh please let that work the next time Mo begs for Trix yogurt!

Chapstick is a great idea, that's something we do. She genuinely needs it, and with all the germiness this winter I gave her her very own stick, and she calls it lipstick, and likes that. But she really wants COLOR.

One thing I'd forgotten about the beginning of this makeup thing was that about a year ago, I had an article written about me with accompanying full-page photo in a major women's magazine. They sent a photographer and a make-up artist to my house, so sozlet was there for all of it, and was absolutely enchanted. The makeup artist was really nice and she and sozlet hit it off. I wear lipstick occasionally but don't really do makeup, and the makeup artist was, well, an artist -- the end result was very natural looking, but was the result of a lot of careful work. (This makeup artist is a real pro, clients include people like Isabella Rosselini.)

Sozlet loved it all, the colors, the brushes, the variety, watching the makeup gal work, how I looked, how everyone oohed and ahhhed, all of it.

I have some very soft sable paint brushes that I've let her play with as "makeup" brushes, but that still doesn't quite satisfy her.

Missed a couple of posts that appeared just as I was posting:

Thomas, I agree that it's probably best to just ride it out, assume that it's a phase. Interesting about the headscarf thing! I can imagine how that would be distressing.

And shewolf, very good points. I also had a major unicorn fetish. And rainbows, rainbows too.

The Will thing ("Will would like that") is a bit of a lightbulb. Both sozlet and her old best friend, Jack, didn't pay much attention to gender roles, pretty much by design in our/ their family. Jack loved dinosaurs and tearing around the yard being a t.rex chasing a triceratops, but so did sozlet. Sozlet loved "Cinderella", but so did Jack. (Truth be told, Jack saw Cinderella first and they both absolutely loved it.)

In preschool, though, things are a lot different. When I observed, I noticed that the boys play with the cars and the knights and dragon action figures and such, but none of the girls do -- except sozlet. The girls play dress up and housekeeping and such.

Oh, this is interesting. I think I want to talk to her teachers about this.

Anyway, Will is pretty much the most boyish of the boyish boys -- he's big, he always wants to play various semi-violent, often TV-based games. When she says, "I think Will would like that", she looks at me and I usually say something like "that's nice of you to think of him" -- instead I might occasionally say something like, "He might. Do you like it?" She might be asking, "Is it OK for me to like that stuff too, or is that just for boys?"

Hmm, but maybe she won't say anything like that after the spell dealie. ;-) FreeDuck, I wish we had a dvr, maybe we'll get one sometime. Usually she just sees commercials between otherwise kosher shows on Nick or Disney, or while she watches something like "Trading Spaces" with me. But that seems to be more than enough.

One thing I heard in regard to preschool for girls is since girls seem attracted to as you say sozobe, dress up and housekeeping, they may lose out in valuable learning tools especially those that help teach math. One suggestion that is made is to put dolls in the block area, as blocks are very good at teaching math skills. When this is done, girls have a tendency to build things like houses for the dolls to play in. Fortunately for me this was never an issue for my daughter as the block area was her favorite part in preschool. And we have toddler blocks (big legos) that daughter received when she was 2 and she still loves to build with them.

I've never met a child that didn't love blocks.

Right now she has no particular compunctions -- she's the only one to regularly cross gender lines. She loves blocks, loves those magnet things that are a similar concept (building, two of this size equals one of that size, etc.)

That's actually what I want to talk to the teachers about, I don't want that stamped out of her. I think that's a GOOD thing. So will ask them more about that issue, how they're handling it, how they see other kids reacting to it, etc.

Sozobe--

You have spawned a polymath with a sense of style. Good for you.

I saw this in the newpaper and it reminded me of this thread....

;-)

So a new dilemma, along the same lines...

I'm starting to plan what classes she'll be taking this summer (if any).

When we first moved here there was a local event where little girls did cheers on stage. She was absolutely captivated, and really really wanted to do it, too. It was an established thing, though, uniforms and everything, not for just anyone to hop up there. Later, at another local event, they were selling pom-poms and I got her one, and she loves it. Does her own little cheers.

So I just found out that it's a class offered by the local parks dept., and after she takes the class she'll be in a local parade (I mean, parade! sozlet! her idea of paradise!), and perform at those events. It's pretty cheap (though I guess we'd have to buy those uniforms... hmmm.)

Anyway, I have no doubt that she would get the biggest thrill out of it, but... cheerleading? :-?

Do you know that these days cheerleaders are getting athletic scholarships to college?

Personally, I cringe, but rah-rah gymnastics does have a place in the 21st century.