Saturday, August 20, 2011
Picking Brains Over Beauty
It first crossed my mind after I read this article on Huff Post (found via @nuckingfutsmama). It's a worthwhile read if you spend any sort of time around little girls. But, just in case you can't go read it now, the article that talks about how we inadavertently teach little girls that appearance is more important than intelligence. It discusses our cultural inclination to emphasize good looks and how we start doing it when little girls are tiny. We do things like greet them with, "Look how cute you are!" and "You look so pretty in that dress!"
I am absolutely guilty of saying those sorts of things to Alexis. I hadn't realized it, but I was saying some of the very things that cause girls to do what I did as a kid--I used to pretend to be much dumber than I was in hopes of my peers accepting me. I thought appearances mattered much more than I should have, so things like having to wear KMart clothes to school crushed me. I wanted to be dumb and pretty.
It took me 25 years to get my head on straight with that sort of stuff. I don't want that to happen to Alexis.
So, I have made some changes in how I interact with her and with the things I say to her. I'm working extra hard to model positive behavior. I have no clue if it's working or if it will matter in the long-run, but I'm trying. That's about as much as I can do right now.
In the meantime, I wondered where Alexis was in terms of some of the statistics listed in the article. In particular, I was saddened to learn that 25% of young women would rather be on America's Next Top Model than win a Nobel Peace Prize. I was even more saddened to learn that nearly half of 3 to 6-year olds worry about being fat. I figured the only way to find out if Alexis has her priorities straight was to ask her.
So, I asked her a series of questions. I didn't prep her in any way--I just asked her if I could "interview her" for a few minutes after we finished dinner. The original video is over five minutes long because HOOBOY did girlfriend love being interviewed, but I cut it down to post here. In the video, I ask her:
- Are you beautiful?
- Are you smart?
- If you could only be smart or beautiful, which one would you want to be?
- Are you fat?
- And a few other things.
Anyway, here's the video. It's completely unedited except that I'm only posting the first few minutes that we chatted.
I can't lie, I felt like doing victory laps around the yard after some of those answers. She's on the right track overall. We need to keep working on accepting that her curly hair is beautiful (seriously, she has the BEST hair--I hate that she doesn't realize it), but most of the rest of it? I pretty much want to scream, "YES! THAT'S MY KID!"
Yet, I have no idea how to keep her on the same path. She's about to enter the bigger world where classmates and teachers and society in general will have a chance to influence her much more than they have so far. I hope to ask her the same sorts of questions once per year or so just to see how her thinking evolves. I hope her answers stay essentially the same.
But I fear they won't.
