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timbrel, May-June 2005 Timbrel assembled two groups of women to participate in conference phone calls about raising daughters and raising sons. We quickly found that an hour wasn’t nearly enough time for such topics, but what follows is at least a brief portion of our conversation about daughters. Names have been withheld from this online version.—Editor
The conversation on daughters began with the topic of fashion and body image. How can mothers help their daughters navigate through the confusing and often contradictory messages in popular culture about standards of beauty, sexuality, and appropriate behavior and dress?
“This is definitely a concern of mine as my girls have a huge stack of Vogue and other magazines that they pore over. I see them trying to imitate models, stars, and starlets in their dress and aspiring to their body shapes,” one person noted. “Not only is it extremely hard on the pocketbook—mainly theirs, I should add—but it’s an exploitive influence psychologically as well.”
“My girls have never been into designer clothes,” another woman said. “Bargain hunting at Goodwill and such has become a wonderful game for them. I’m happy about it but not sure I can take credit.”
“My daughters are very different from each other,” a third person said. “It’s the youngest emerging as the one who cares so much about what her clothes look like: that they’re faded just the right amount, the pant legs flare just so. She’s not interested in the bargain racks anymore.”
“In our household, we aim for a middle ground,” one person said. “Like recently my daughter told us about a girl wobbling down the halls in shoes she could barely walk in. ‘That’s a fashion victim,’ she said. . . . But one of our rules is (continued) that hair must be a color found in nature.”
The group agreed that what really matters is helping girls to develop a healthy sense of self-esteem. As one woman put it: “Are they kind people? Are they treating others respectfully, and themselves with respect? . . . My partner has put in an unbelievable number of hours with his children, hours reading books and talking. Having an involved spouse in raising daughters led to a healthy sense of who they are. Letting them express themselves as they need to is okay.”
“As I’ve gotten older, my style of parenting has lightened up a bit,” another participant reflected. “I’m not apt to get so uptight as if there’s one right way of growing up. Each child is unique. I would advise a parenting approach that is more going with the flow. These girls are still discovering who they are. That might change next year or next week.”
A question to consider is whether you’re dealing with a moral issue or just something that’s embarrassing to you, said the third person. She described exploring a pastoral position at a church during a time when her daughter only wanted to wear pants. “Getting her to wear a dress to church was going to be a major battle. I had to ask myself, Do I want her to hate this church? I had to accept that what was at issue were my feelings about my own image, not about her.”
Still it’s also important that children see how their choices—about dress or any number of things— affect other members of their family. “We are a biracial family—I am African-American and my husband is Irish and Polish—and when we go out in public, people are looking at us,” the fourth participant noted. “In their appearance, I ask the girls to respect that.”
Issues around body image, appropriate weight maintenance, and health remain serious concerns within the group. “I have worried about eating disorders,” said one woman. Another mentioned a young friend of her girls who was hospitalized for self-destructive behavior. “I look at her and wonder what it is that keeps my girls from feeling that self-defeated and angry. Sometimes it is a fine line,” she said.
A second topic concerned the newer forms of technology and how they impact girls and communication.
“One of my daughters is instant messaging as we speak,” one woman noted. “They can do things on the computer that I don’t even know how to do—much less how to monitor.”
While this participant wants to be careful about how electronic communication is used, she has observed its benefits, too. For example, one daughter chats by computer with friends in Pakistan, Iraq, and Australia. As a result, this girl’s worldview, her mother reported, “is so different than mine was, growing up.”
At one time, said a second person, “I had no intentions of having even a TV. I’m sometimes shocked by the amount of technology we have: high-speed Internet access, cable, Nintendo, instant messaging, and a teen with her own cell phone.
“Each addition made sense at the time,” she commented. “Sometimes it seems like too much, but I haven’t figured out what I might want to carve away.” She is pleased to see her youngest daughter’s “fearless” attitude about technology, and noted that for a school project this girl chose to focus on robotics.
“As a mom, I am so grateful for e-mail and instant messaging. One daughter instant-messages me a lot,” another person said. “My girls have never been big phone users; we’ve never had to set limits on that. But the computer is another story.
“Still, we haven’t set a lot of parameters,” she continued. “The kids are good students, so it’s not like they’re not getting their work done. If it got to the point where it seemed like they were always in front of computer screens and not interacting with people face to face, I would be concerned. We’ve noticed how you say more when communicating by computer than you do in person.”
“One of my daughters is very quiet; she’s a writer, an artist, an interior thinker. She is more comfortable talking on the computer,” a fourth participant said. “As a parent I want to figure out how to help move her into a world that she can touch.”
One thing their family decided is to keep the computer in the living room, so it’s in a public space.
Another group member also reported having a soft-spoken daughter who has a hard time speaking up when she is unhappy. While some girls are very verbal, helping other daughters to “use her words” when they have a problem can take effort.
To return to technology, one person noted that cell phones can be an important safety tool. “When our oldest daughter got her driver’s license and was driving alone at night we decided to get a cell phone that would stay in the vehicle for emergency use only,” she said.
“One surprising thing to me about parenting is how I’ve come to understand my mother’s concerns when I was a teenager and young adult,” another person noted. “I was very independent and she had reservations about me driving distances by myself, etc. I resented her seeming protectiveness. Now as a mother of daughters who wants to give them their independence, I’m identifying with the worries about all that entails. In other words, I appreciate what I put my mother through and understand what that meant for her to ‘let go.’ ”
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