High Street children’s stores have junked pretty dresses in favour of crop tops and mini skirts. There’s no doubt that little girls are becoming prematurely adult in many ways. She leaned into my ear and whispered imperiously: ‘She looks awful.’ I remember being at a wedding with her when another little girl came in wearing a gorgeous party dress.
I’ve even seen some unpleasant adult fault lines in Sophie’s own behaviour. One friend confided that her eight-year-old had been squeezed out of a hitherto fairly tight-knit clique because she refused to worship Justin Bieber. I’ve been genuinely astounded at some of the stories I’ve heard. Little girls can also be incredibly bitchy to one another - perhaps another toxic cog in the revolving wheel of female self-doubt. (My daughter frequently takes an arbitrary dislike to the things I bring home, on the basis she won’t look nice in them.)Ī straw poll of friends who had sons and daughters revealed that their little girls were without question more complex, difficult, and hard to please. They readily accepted whatever clothes I bought them at Sophie’s age without questioning my choice. On the other hand, my three boys (Sam, now 18, Max, 15, and Aaron, 12) never suffered with self-doubt. But I felt my femininity had been cut adrift in a household peppered with headless Action Men, brash talk about toilets, and a Himalayan range of muddy football boots by the back door. Spool back several years to when I became pregnant with Sophie. Saddening: An extract from the six-year-old's diary
#GIRL WITH DIAREY TORRENT#
I slumped on the bed in shock at this torrent of low self-esteem. Page one read: ‘I am a stupid, silly and ugly girl.’ The harsh words of self-criticism jarred painfully with her large, childish handwriting.Īs I turned the page, there was more: ‘I looked horrid in my brydsmade dress’ ‘I looked fat and ugly at school today’ ‘My plaits looked stupid today . . .’ And so it went on, page after page of blistering self-recrimination. Forget soft-focus innocence, as I opened the front cover I froze in shock. There were hardly going to be any earth-shattering confessions lurking between the pages of her pink Barbie diary, were there? I know that reading someone else’s diary is the ultimate act of betrayal. I imagined it would be crammed with entries about getting her new gold sparkly shoes from Monsoon and how excited she was that we were going to make a teddy bear at the weekend.
Dear diary: Angela Epstein was shocked to see the criticisms her daughter Sophie had written about herself
0 kommentar(er)
