Moms of Girls: a Good Self Image Starts with You

Twenty-something Broadway and Nickelodeon star Ariana Grande admits her mom feared she would take the wrong path in life. “For my fifth birthday party, we had a Jaws theme and all my friends left crying,” she says in an eOnline interview. “I am still that way. But when I was little it was more concerning. There was a stage, when I was three or four, where my mom thought I might grow up to be a serial killer.” Calling herself “dark and deranged” in the article, she recalls, “I always wanted to have skeleton face paint on or be a Freddy Krueger mask, and I would carry a hockey stick around. I was a mini Helena Bonham Carter.” She told Billboard Magazine that she is now a “micromanaging obsessive-compulsive workaholic,” so at least we know she took all that weirdness and channeled it into something that works for her. And that’s really all moms can hope for their daughters's futures —to find something that speaks to them; something they can pour themselves into that has the capacity to sustain and challenge them as adults.

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But how on earth do moms get them to that point? And how can their daughters even begin to grasp what it’s like to be their moms when they are at an age where their girls can’t see past the ends of their noses?

It seems in some school districts girls can pick up a few things about the rigors of parenting by being forced to learn them. NPR aired a story in which high school girls in a particular public school district were given mechanical babies that were programmed with the behavior of real ones. The school district, which spent $3000 on each little robot, wanted its young women to think twice about teen pregnancy. These rubber dolls were even programmed to emit the recorded cries of real infants and were capable of being silenced by satisfying one of four needs: hunger, wetness, coddling, or pain. The two teenaged girls were friends but polar opposites in many ways. One was a demure, religiously devout young lady whose dream was to remain untouched until she could find a religious man and raise his children, hopefully around age twenty-one. She considered that part of her life as her highest calling, so she was excited to have the opportunity to emulate the role of a mother. The other girl wasn’t ruling out the idea of being a mom but figured she wanted motherhood to befall her by age thirty or older, was clueless as to what it might be like, and was lukewarm about the idea of having to take on this task.

The most fascinating thing about the story was that the girl who thought she would be a great mom was not the one who got the best grade in this experiment. Sweet and feminine sounding (it's great how NPR tells stories using people's own voices in the narrative), she considered herself a natural nurturer, but she quickly became frustrated and desperate for a break, often asking for help and handing the baby off to others to look after out of sheer exasperation. As a result, she earned a “C” on the assignment. The girl with career aspirations and no plans to marry any time soon received an “A” grade. Why? She took a more measured, almost business-like approach in satisfying the needs of the fake baby, eliminating one cause for the robot’s fussiness before looking to the next. It wasn’t that she was eager to become a mom right away (after all, the point of this lesson was to discourage teen pregnancy), it was just that because of this experience she felt confident she could figure out how to handle it when the time came.

Reflections that Speak Volumes

Whatever path they choose, it’s a mother's job to prepare their daughters for the years ahead. Moms (as well as dads) are key to encouraging their daughters to never accept second best for themselves. But why does it seem, to many mothers, that daughters are more difficult to raise than boys? While boys may be harder to discipline, have to be watched more carefully for physical safety disasters, and often become monosyllabic communicators by the time they are teens, it has been said that girls grow up less confident than boys. Even though girls may seem a tad smarter in general, intellect alone doesn’t seem to help them through their periods of self-doubt. Self-esteem issues due to body image begin to emerge during adolescence, when increasingly rounder body parts clash with the popular images of slender, lanky models and idols girls see in magazines, online, and in movies.

That’s why it’s important for moms to convey healthy messages about their own bodies, diet, and exercise. When girls see their moms constantly complaining about themselves, they learn to do the same. Think about it. The world has been telling girls and women what they should want to look like from the time they were small and many took it quite seriously.

Perhaps if moms became the example of good self-esteem, it might help their daughters do the same. Mothers have to do more than simply stop complaining about their own appearances. They actually have to make an effort to appreciate themselves and verbalize that appreciation to their daughters. If you’ve spent half your life crabbing about too-large hips, flabby underarms, or the tiny waist that never returned after childbirth, it’s hard to do. How do you look in the bathroom mirror and find something nice to say about yourself when you’ve got a small, wispy-haired girl sitting on the edge of the tub, absorbing every move you make and every word you utter?

Think about where a woman's self-esteem issues may have potentially originated. Then think of how moms are unwittingly wishing the same on their daughters simply by thinking they are not enough, and an entire crop of questions arise: Was it because these women did not get validation about their looks from their parents? Were they hurt beyond measure when some clueless boy or insecure girl at school said something disconcerting about their looks? Did they idolize someone else’s body they knew they could never have? Did they simply buy into and keep trying to live up to what the media told them was beautiful? Did they put up with a father, a mother, an ex-husband or a boyfriend that made them feel diminished? It could have been some or all of these things.

If you are a mom, it might be good homework to think about what messed up your image of yourself up in the first place. Can you think of an instance where a man would put down his own looks in front of his child except to joke about -- perhaps-- male pattern baldness? Isn’t it amazing how many men describe themselves as outrageously attractive on dating websites, but reality often finds the women viewing their profiles discovering something entirely different when we they see them in person?

It all boils down to how they see themselves. And as a mom of a daughter, positive self-image starts with you.