How to Come to Terms With Your Daughter’s Pink Princess Phase
This morning my daughter cried – well, she’s two, so she cries every morning about something – but today it was because she didn’t like her new scooter helmet.
“I want pink!” she said.
“Already?” – said the husband, looking at me, as if it was my fault.
In my casual black yoga pants and tees (hey, you never know when you can work out), I probably love sporty style more than chic style. But I avoid boxes and accept contradictions: I am a feminist who does a manicure (and after two minutes she clears her nails); I love hot pink, but I never wear heels. What could be wrong with a child wearing gender-specific clothing?
But when my daughter said again, “I want pink!” – I felt a vague uneasiness.
She already showed an addiction to packs and anything that sparkled, glowed, tilted or swirled. And while her screen time was limited to Elmo, Monster Cookie and Paw Patrol, I wondered if I could actually fight the Disney car and its princesses.
According to Deborah Blahor, author of the new book “Guide feminist parenting little princess: how to grow a true, joyful and fearless girl – even if she refuses to wear anything other than pink tutus” , feminist parents were concerned about this culture princesses make them girls to suffer. They are worried about images of helpless princesses waiting for a man to save them. They worry that their daughters have fallen under the spell of cunning marketing. They fear that girls will forever remain obsessed with their appearance.
Embarrassed to throw away all our gadgets, lock herself in our house and never let her play with other girls, I wondered how I could still help my daughter become a strong feminist leader. Here’s what parents like me can do:
Take the politics out of the pink (it’s just color!)
For Blahor, it all started with Flower Week, when her baby went to school of a different color every day. For her daughter Marie, Friday, a day of pink, has proven to be a psychotic threshold for toddlers, the moment when, she says, “your child switches from a charming little man with gentle manners to a creature whose sole purpose is to make everyone around him miserable.”
But Blahor, who has never been a fan of pink, tulle or tutu herself, is learning to see beyond color. “All the fears that I felt for my daughter merged into one soft, innocent color,” she writes in her book. “Marie had no such fear. For her, pink was her favorite color. There was no baggage weighing him down because she hadn’t carried it yet … Pink was the center of her fun. Pink was her enthusiasm, her joy and her uncomplicated, beautiful, sparkling love of life. ” I like it!
However, children over time begin to receive different messages from the TV, from the aisle with toys and from their peers. When his daughter came home from school one day and said that the boy had told her that pink was “the color for girls,” writer Mike Reynolds had to be hard-pressed that this statement was not true. He writes on HuffPost :
My goal was to bring it to the point where each color would be known as a color, not a boy’s or a girl’s. “A girl might like pink, and a boy might like pink,” I tried to explain. “A girl might like blue, and a boy might like blue,” I continued. “There are no colors that only boys or only girls like – they are all exactly the same.”
I decided at night to call each color a boy’s color AND a girl’s color, and I told her that she could say (to a particular boy) exactly that the next day if she really wanted to. Because (Concrete Boy) doesn’t have to hear that enough.
Anyway, while I tell my baby that her favorite color is green.
Balance things about the princess with content you love
It’s okay for me to be the “that mom” my mother and mother-in-law laugh at because of my strict “No!” For example: “No, she doesn’t even know what ice cream is, can we leave it that way?” So I know how to endure the heat.
But what should I do with culture? This is a struggle of a lifetime.
One mom from my kindergarten with two daughters never let Disney films into her house. Do I want to do this too?
“Part of my problem is that I don’t want to be a weird mom or daughter-in-law, and I don’t want my daughters to be weird kids,” writes Christia Spears Brown in her book Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise children free from gender stereotypes .
I was a strange kid. Forget about the princesses – I wasn’t even allowed to watch The Boat of Love and Fantasy Island. I missed out on a lot of talk about the schoolyard water cooler. I will not leave my daughter aside. But I’m going to avoid the princess complex for as long as possible, perhaps instead I will involve my daughter in Pixar films. My all-time favorite animated film is Inside Out , which focuses on the complex inner life of a teenager rather than her appearance.
Look, I’m not worried about my daughter becoming a passive yellowtail – she’s determined, ferocious (and honestly, she’s probably more bully). But I don’t want the world to make her that way either. I don’t think one pink tutu can handle this, but if it’s a slippery slope, I’ll go with it right now.
Change the ending (and have fun!)
With Moana, Elsa and others, modern heroines are getting better – less passive, less dependent on male love. Nevertheless, I was scared to the point of pointlessness to read all these books about culture against little girls, written by mothers who in some way try to fight it. I really want to get in a time machine and go back to 1983, where there was no gender toy section and nothing on Saturday morning television except Planet of the Apes. I have a desire to control everything my daughter wears, watches and consumes.
But, as Blanchor advises in The Feminist’s Guide, parents should take it with a sense of humor. “Make a list of wishes your daughter might ask her fairy godmother to fulfill. When the list is complete, gently tap your daughter on the forehead and then excitedly say, “I found your fairy godmother! This is your brain, and she was here the whole time! “- writes Blahor.
Remind the girls that they are their own heroes.