Getting Daughters Through Their Teens

Overt Messages of Feminine Perfection

You know, it breaks my heart to see what our society worships as the feminine ideal, and they start pushing it as early as elementary school.  

Little girls have dolls that teach them how to put make up on and style hair.  They have Barbie dolls with boobs and sexy clothes and they want to be just like them, right down to having a perfect Ken.

I feel the Barbie Doll perfect figures, as well as the buff and beautiful young women on TV, in movies, or in teen magazines, all set the bar way too high for normal teenage girls and the parents who love them.

96% of the population –-especially teens, can’t compete with what Mother Nature handed the remaining 4%.  This goes for teens who bust their butts at a gym six out of seven days a week trying to look like the chosen few.

It’s no wonder teenage girls develop a poor self-image, eating disorders, and resort to cutting, or worse --they hate themselves, at such a young age. It makes a mother’s job nearly impossible when the only tool she has to counter those overt messages of feminine perfection is Love.

I remember when my daughters went through their teens.  I would hear “why am I so ugly?”, or “I have pimples.”, or “I’m too fat.” I knew from my own experience as a teen, they were comparing themselves to bombarded images of perfection that just weren’t real.

Commercials on TV said to wear this make up, or this hair color, or this perfume, or these clothes.  Otherwise, they would never get the guy, or fit in, or have friends; magazine models showed them how they should look and dress and wear their hair; even the emaciated-looking manikins in Macy’s window wearing the trendiest outfits send the message, “You’re ugly.  You should look like this.”

I tried my best to explain the true realities of life:

“There will always be someone prettier, somewhere.  What’s more important is the beauty inside —-you have that, and you have the outside beauty, too.“

“Somewhere, there will always be someone smarter.  What’s most important is, if you do your best — that will always be good enough.“

“There will always be someone somewhere who seems to have it all.  That’s just life.  Accept the unique person you are. You will always be special just the way you are.“

“There’s no one anywhere exactly like you, and there won’t ever be another.  I love who you are and I love the woman/women you are becoming.

We made it through my daughters’ teens, like I made it through mine.  Now they’re married with children of their own and I’m sure they’ve faced many similar issues I focused on in this post. 

I feel confident they remember the conversations about self-confidence, body image and the love of Self to carry them forward with their teens.

Poet/Writer/Author of 5 books.
Quora Top Writer 2018.
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