Beautiful Moms

I recently asked a group of little girls, “Who is the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?”  Without exception, every one of them said, “My mom.”  Then I asked a group of pre-teen and teen girls, “Who is the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen?”  The answers were very different.  Actresses, singers, and models dominated their answers.  What happened?  I have some theories:

1.        Smart = beautiful.  The older a girl gets, the dumber her mother becomes.  Thankfully, this usually shifts back, but not until a girl has children of her own!

2.        Celebrities don’t discipline our daughters.  The fact that they (probably) do discipline their own daughters is lost on ours.

3.       TV and movies tell our daughters that it is ok to do things their mothers don’t want them to do, and that their mothers are trying to hold them back from ‘finding’ themselves. 

4.       Celebrities and singers look good all the time.  Our daughters see us when we haven’t had our coffee yet.

  My daughter has culture thrown at her every day, images and commercials and products that try to beat into her what she is supposed to look like or be like to be beautiful.  I am her mother, so I have to be there to balance it. I’m not going to shelter her from the world that IS, I’m going to show her what it SHOULD be.   I make a special effort to have her around women who can show her what Real Beauty is, and then she has to choose.

What can we do to stay #1 in our daughters’ beauty ranking?  I don’t know, because I don’t think it matters.    I would like for my daughter to think I’m beautiful all the time, but I don’t need her (or her brother or even her father) to always think I’m beautiful  in order to know that I am.  That’s what I want to teach her, to be secure in her own beauty no matter what others think.  It’s a hard lesson to learn, for all of us Beautiful Girls!

Now, call your mother and tell her she's beautiful!  She might not NEED to hear it, but she will LOVE to hear it!