Yesterday when my daughter came home from school I noticed she had blue stuff on her eye brows. It looked like crayon, so I dismissed it thinking that it was from when they did an activity at school. You know when your child comes back from school with marker on their hands because they were colouring at school. Yeah I thought that’s all it was…
This morning I walked into the washroom and found my 5 year old with eyeliner pencil and nail polish on her eye brows. Naturally I was upset, I asked her why she had eyeliner and nail polish on her eye brows. She said with tears in her eyes “I just want to be beautiful”. Suddenly one of my biggest fears hit me like a brick wall, the fear that my daughter would one day believe that she wasn’t “good enough”. It had happened… and eight years sooner then I thought.
I tell my daughters daily that they are beautiful, I rarely wear make-up, I do my best to build up their confidence and self-esteem. Clearly it hadn’t been enough, I wanted to know why my daughter thought she wasn’t beautiful. She told me her friends had told her that she doesn’t have eyebrows and that she needed them to be pretty, that she had to wear make-up if she ever wanted to be pretty. It’s heartbreaking and enraging that my five year old feels like she isn’t beautiful, and that she’s being told she isn’t beautiful without make-up.
As parents it’s our job to teach our kids to be confident, we should be building up their self-esteem so much that when people say negative things about their appearance or anything hurtful they’ll just brush it off. Unfortunately human beings are cruel, and you can’t control what every parent teaches their kid(s), or even what people will say.
We are however in charge of ourselves and what we as individuals teach our kids. We should be teaching our kids that everyone is different in their own way and that’s okay! That everyone is beautiful or handsome in their own way, you don’t have to wear make-up or be a clone repeat of someone else to be good enough, just be yourself. It shouldn’t matter what someone looks like, what their skin color is, what they wear, you shouldn’t be judging, everyone is different for a reason. How boring would life be if we were all the same?!