"Why I'll Never Tell My Daughter She's Pretty"

Part One of Two.

I’ve read a couple of articles on Substack in the last week or so from brilliant women writers talking about their relationship with their face. It has got me thinking because many of their thoughts and experiences resonated with me.

For example,

Farrah @Substack

published a piece last Sunday about how she has never felt pretty, something much to my mum’s disappointment that I have always felt myself, despite her efforts my entire life to insist otherwise.

Survival of the prettiest

Then this morning I read a piece by

Anniki Sommerville

where she discusses the same thing, making mention of the stunning bestfriend she grew up with who always left her feeling in the shade.

My relationship with my face

Anniki now has botox and filler to help her feel better about her face, and this is something that has crossed my mind recently especially when I look in the mirror and see lines appearing seemingly overnight and my top lip shrinking.

So what stops me? Well, I shall come to that, because I think this needs to be a two-part post. But first, I wondered why we women grow up with these thoughts, and it reminded me of a piece I wrote in The Times seven years ago explaining why I never told my daughter she was pretty.

It is behind The Times paywall but I have brought it out to show you what I said and, I was thinking, now my daughter is eleven, do I still do this? Did I stick to The Times headline that I would ‘never’ tell my daughter she was pretty? And most importantly, seven years on, do I think I did the right thing?

It caused a bit of controversy at the time, I think it even made it into that Daily Mail sidebar of hell, or whatever people call their website. I remember going on ITV’s This Morning and arguing with Eamonn Holmes who thought I was a very wicked mother indeed for not telling my daughter she was pretty and, I felt, missing my point entirely. (There is a clip on YouTube I think of us arguing about this, but I can’t bear to put it here, especially as they cut it before I came back and gave him what for).

Anyway, why don’t you have a read and see if you agree with me – I would love to know your thoughts, particularly after reading Farrah and Anniki’s pieces, too. And next week I’ll let you know if this ‘experiment’ of mine was successful in my opinion. Was I right to bring my child up not telling her she was pretty? Perhaps I’m going to need to ask her for myself.

Here’s The Times piece out from behind the paywall…

Why I’ll Never Tell My Daughter That She’s Pretty

Anna Wharton, the mother of Gracie, aged four, believes there’s only one way to stop girls from becoming obsessed with their looks

My four-year-old daughter recently started school. As she filed into the classroom alongside all the other children in their freshly pressed uniforms — the girls with bows that matched their chequered dresses and shiny new shoes — it seemed only natural to wonder where my child would rank among the others as the years go by. Will she be the bookish one? The clever one? The funny one? The pretty one? And that thought made me stop because, truth be told, I don’t want her to be the pretty one, and as I looked around I was relieved to see many other little girls among her classmates who could already steal that crown.

The last thing I want is for Gracie to judge herself primarily on her looks. In fact, I’ve made a point to avoid telling her she is pretty. I can remember only one or two occasions when I’ve commented on her looks in four years, and even then the words stuck in my throat.

A study published last week by Girlguiding UK found that a third of seven to ten-year-old girls believed that they were judged more on their appearance than on their ability. In the same study, 36 per cent of girls felt that people thought how they looked was the most important thing about them; 42 per cent of the girls surveyed also believed that, to be successful, women had to be attractive as well as good at their jobs. It is what I’ve always suspected, and yet it still makes thoroughly depressing reading.

These girls were just a few years older than Gracie, and yet these dangerous messages had started that drip into their brains. Imagine having an awareness at seven that your future is already mapped out for you, that you won’t be judged so much for your high Sats score, or your ability to share with your friends, but on how nicely your hair is plaited, or how pretty your smile is.

It is impossible to be a woman and not be aware of this constant judgment by society. I know my 40 years have taught me the same thing, and they’ve led to a lifetime of me focusing on my blemishes in the mirror, rather than all the other good things I’ve done and been.

I remember as a child being dressed up in pretty clothes, encouraged to twirl in front of relatives while they oohed and aahed in appreciation. I doubt they would have been as impressed by my show of long multiplication.

Why should we be surprised? This judgment starts as soon as you take your baby for their first outing in a pram. For a long time strangers mistook Gracie for a boy because I didn’t put her in pink, but at least that way she avoided all the comments about prettiness.

I bite my lip when my mum hugs and squeezes Gracie and tells her how pretty she is, or when her father says good morning when she crawls into bed and swears each day she has grown more beautiful overnight.

I don’t ask them to stop, because I realise that someone has to tell her she’s pretty — they have a right to their own relationship with her — I just don’t want that person to be me. I have deliberately dressed her in trousers and unisex clothes, desperately avoiding pink, so that she wouldn’t get uninvited comments from strangers about her looks, or wouldn’t take inordinate amounts of pleasure in twirling in front of the mirror in princess dresses.

What I tell my daughter instead is how funny she is, how clever, how fast she can run or how high she can jump. I value my daughter for these things, and shower her daily in those kinds of compliments because I want her to be so many more things than just pretty.

It’s not that I don’t think my daughter is pretty — I do. I’m just glad she isn’t the prettiest. It’s better to be average looking and have a load of other skills in your arsenal. It seems to me that that’s the easiest way of avoiding years of being complimented on your looks, and then chasing those compliments for the rest of your life, feeling undervalued when they stop.

How we feel about our appearance, or how we’re perceived by others, has a huge effect on the way we conduct our lives. A 2014 government-commissioned Body Confidence study estimated that 10 million women in the UK “feel depressed” because of the way they look, with more than half of the 2,339 women questioned saying they felt powerless about society’s obsession with looks. One in four women said their body image held them back from having a fulfilling relationship, and another quarter said it stopped them going for the jobs they wanted.

So, sadly, it feels that these seven-year-old girls are in training for anxiety that will follow them throughout their lives.

Yet it’s easy to see how these seemingly harmless perceptions have wider implications. If girls are aware that others judge them not on their abilities but on their looks, this is likely to affect their career choices, and even life choices.

A Stanford University study found that females in male-dominated fields such as the Stem topics (science, technology, engineering and maths) are so intimidated by their work environment that they play down “typical” female traits, believing that wearing make-up makes them seem less serious about maths, for example.

This in itself doesn’t sound hugely worrying, until you hear that those same women also suppressed traits such as the desire to have children.

Like most parents, I want my daughter to feel that she can be or achieve anything, so, given studies such as these, I’m aware that each piece of information seeps into her brain and informs the opinion she has of herself or others, which is why I do my bit to reverse the damage.

In the Girlguiding survey, 38 per cent of the 1,627 girls questioned thought they were not pretty enough. The majority said that what would most improve their lives would be if people would stop judging females on the way they look.

So let’s listen to them. Girlguiding certainly has. In 2014 it introduced its first “body confidence” badge. As part of the training for the badge, these “correspondents” go to sessions where they learn how to be confident, and recognise myths about how girls and women “should” look.

It is also beginning a social media campaign asking people to think about how they compliment girls and to focus on their achievements and attributes.

So perhaps I’m on to something, however harsh it sounds at first, when I don’t tell my daughter she’s pretty. Change has to start somewhere.

As I came to the end of writing this piece, I thought it was only fair to ask Gracie. So I did: “Do you think you’re pretty?”

“Yes,” she beamed, flicking her little bob back from her face. “And good at drawing.”

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