A royal pain
Try not to obsess over daughter’s princess obsession, Devorah Blachor writes.
Once upon a time there was a little girl whose passion for pink was so intense that she steamrolled her princess-averse parents and ushered in a period of tulle and tiaras that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. It was so over the top that Cinderella might have pretended to hurl.
For a time I (the mother in this fairy tale), worried it would end badly. I imagined the princess obsession was a prelude to my daughter, Mari, becoming superficial. I feared that as an adult she’d be easy prey for glittery marketing campaigns coaxing her to spend her hard-earned cash on lipstick and face creams and increasingly invasive methods of body-hair removal. I was most concerned that she’d base her self-worth on her looks, which wouldn’t boost her self-esteem.
Mari’s proclivity for pink isn’t unique. Legions of these little princesses shun gender-neutral clothing. “Wait — I need my crown and cape,” Mari would say as we left the house for errands. There’s nothing new about little girls loving princesses. As originally reported in Peggy Orenstein’s Cinderella Ate My Daughter, a Disney executive saw little girls at a Disney on Ice show in 2000 wearing homemade princess dresses and realized the company was missing a golden merchandising opportunity.
A decade-and-a-half later, Disney princesses are a multibillion-dollar industry. Parents of princess-obsessed little girls, who have purchased at minimum a princess item or two (or more likely, dozens), understand this. Their daughters wear Aurora dresses while sipping from Ariel water bottles and nestling in pop-up princess tents with their talking Elsa plush dolls.
But what does it all mean? Was my daughter’s princess obsession really something for me to obsess about? Reflecting the newness of the princess phenomenon, research examining its effect is just emerging. A 2009 study suggests showing princess images to children ages three to six doesn’t impact their self-esteem. A 2011 study observed that girls who favour frilly dresses sometimes grow into sporty adolescents. A 2016 study found that “princess engagement was not associated with concurrent body esteem,” but it also linked princess play with higher levels of genderstereotypical behaviour.
I could tell parents of Little Princesses to relax, but of course we’re parents, so that would be pointless. Even if a princess obsession is harmless — and we don’t know that yet — the statistics for girls and body image are dismal. Eighty per cent of 10-year-old girls have been on a diet. Forty to 60 per cent of elementary school-age girls are concerned about becoming overweight. Many girls begin to express concern about their weight by age six. These are the kinds of numbers that, if you are the parent of a little girl, make you consider moving to a town with no internet access.
Most of us, however, will not go to those extremes. So we do the best we can with what we’ve got, which is a hyper-commercialized culture that fills every available crevice with marketing.
Mari just turned six. She still loves dressing up and playing princess. She loves animals just as much though.
My preconceived notions of what she should embrace or reject are misguided. My job is not to stand in her way, but to clear the path ahead of her when I can, or to hold her hand as she negotiates it. Once in a while, Mari still decides to wear her cape outside.