Griego: Challenge of rearing girls not helped by our culture

Thursday, March 22, 2007

My 8-year-old daughter flaps her arms when she is excited. She's done this since she was a baby. Sometimes I catch her, sitting on her bed, leaning over her open notebook and I know that the sentence she has just written or the picture she has drawn pleases her because there she is, elbows bent near her sides, forearms waving, wrists flopping.

When she was 4 years old, a girl in her preschool class teased her about it. My daughter was embarrassed and I told her not to worry too much; some children had forgotten they had once been angels. She just doesn't remember what it was like to have wings, I said. This, too, pleased my daughter and off to bed she flapped.

I have always loved this unconscious habit of hers and, over the years, it has become for me something of a barometer of her girlhood. I wonder how long it will last, how long it will be before she begins to see and judge herself through the eyes of her peers or the glimpses she catches of mass media. It is not a "cool" gesture. It is most definitely not "hot," a description which, when applied to the appeal of a human being, has joined our household's forbidden word list. Why, she wanted to know when I asked her not to use it. It's inappropriate, I told her.

The sexualization of girls has been in the news lately with the release of the American Psychological Association's report on the subject. Women dressed as girls, girls dressed as women, the reduction of femininity to sexuality, the psychological and emotional damage this causes. None of this is new, but it is more ubiquitous, going mainstream, entering a store, a magazine, a song, a television show near you. It will require me to return a pair of pants to Target because what looked good on the hanger - appropriate for an 8-year-old - clung to my daughter in a most inappropriate way. My husband and I consider ourselves lucky she is something of a tomboy.

I doubt she could pick out either Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton. She does not watch any of the 'tween shows on the Disney channel. She does not own Bratz dolls. These are ways in which my husband and I build our beachhead against "popular" culture. We undermine much of this by watching America's Next Top Model and only half-heartedly shooing her from the room.

As noxious as the business of reducing women and girls to their navels, boobs and butts is, it is also never far from my mind that my husband and I are my daughter's first teachers. Right now, I am her most influential female role model. To that end, Judith Warner, in a guest column for The New York Times, raised pertinent questions last weekend when she asked: "How can we (mothers) expect our daughters to navigate the cultural rapids of becoming sexual beings when we ourselves are flying blind?"

"How can we teach them to inhabit their bodies with grace and pleasure if we spend our own lives locked in hateful battles of control, mastery and self-improvement?"

I plead guilty to some of this. I try not to engage in "fat talk" in front of my children because my mother did it in front of me and it only made me sad. I did not understand why she hated her hips and waist. I loved them precisely because they were warm and soft and reassuring. My mom joined Weight Watchers and Jazzercise. She used a food scale and Sweet'N Low. She was a size 14.

So, I save the I'm-so-fat moments for my sisters, conversations in which we dissect ourselves in rabid fashion and then protest, "Oh, but you look good." We try out various "anti-aging" lotions and potions, and I admit flirting with the possibility of Botox injections, which I might have tried by now if I weren't certain that I would be the first recipient to end up with some sort of hideous, drooling side effect.

A few years back, I tuned into the audio diary of an obese 16-year-old boy. I didn't realize my daughter was also hanging on to every word. Later, she said she felt sad because the boy hated his body.

"Mom," she asked me then, "what's your favorite part of your body?"

Oh, here's a teaching moment, I thought, and after a frantic second I said I didn't have a favorite part, that I was pretty satisfied in general. "What's your favorite part?" I asked her because now I was curious.

"My heart," she said. "Because it fills with love."

This topic prompted me to ask her the same question for the second and perhaps last time this week. "My legs," she answered this time and then ran out to ride her bike.

I am the mother of a daughter who soon enough will become a young woman and I hope to teach her that her body is both functional - we use proper names in our house - and sacred. That she is as she was meant to be, born with many gifts of the mind and spirit, which she will discover and share because that is how we honor ourselves and others.

My daughter still flaps her arms. She's learned to channel the movement into hand clapping when she's in public. But at home, where she feels safe, she waves those arms as if she really could fly.

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com