Is It OK To Tell Your Daughter She’s Pretty?
Finding the line between us and the FaceTune Moms.
Disclaimer: You’re reading this because you value my input as a journalist who reports on these issues and therefore has a lot of informed opinions. I’m not a healthcare provider, and these responses are not meant to substitute for medical or therapeutic advice.
Q: Do you ever tell your daughters they look pretty or beautiful? I try never to make appearance-based comments about my daughter — other than things like, “That's such a cool shirt!” Or, “I love the color of those shoes!” But then I see moms giving their daughters pep talks about how they are smart and kind and beautiful, and I wonder if I'm giving my daughter some kind of complex, and over time she'll start to have some anxiety that her mother doesn't think she's beautiful? And then seek external validation elsewhere??
I'm sure the moral of this story is the classic, don't let stuff you see on Instagram send you down anxiety rabbit holes, but I do wonder.
When I was about 12 years old, I asked my mother if I was pretty. Like you (and me! But we’ll get to that!) she was a deeply feminist mom who never led with appearance-based compliments. We both enjoyed clothes, and she would praise the creativity of an outfit —I had a very Claudia Kishi aesthetic for most of middle school— but she never said much about my body or my face. This was liberating and protective in so many ways because I knew, at my core, that how I looked was not my value. But by age 12, I also knew that beauty mattered a lot to everyone outside our house. It mattered to the cool girls at school. It mattered to the boys, or at least it seemed like it must matter to boys and that boys must matter a lot.
So one day, sitting at our kitchen table, I said, “So, sometimes, I wonder, am I pretty?” And her response was: “Well, I guess it depends on what you’re wearing, and whether you’ve done your hair.”