A troubled generation of glam girls
Are princess dresses the slippery slope to becoming Paris Hilton? Yes, former teacher Sue Palmer warns
The girl was 11 but looked older in her makeup and trendy clothes. She sat chatting with her parents but Sue Palmer, watching from the next restaurant table, was filled with foreboding. She could not take her eyes off the girl’s “kissable” lips and “flirtatious” behaviour. To Palmer, this girl wasn’t just innocently playing at being a lady. This “clever, successful, sexy, perfect alpha girl” was the symbol of all our modern daughters, and an emergency of epic proportions: feminism gone wrong, consumerism unchecked, sex saturation, excessive screen time instead of play.
“I believe that if we don’t get a grip on this problem soon, the increase in developmental disorders, behavioural difficulties and mental health problems recorded by experts over recent decades will soon run out of control.”
So opens 21st Century Girls, Palmer’s latest book on modern child rearing. Palmer is nothing if not a provocateur: the first book by this former elementary school headteacher, Toxic Childhood, triggered headlines and campaigns, backed by an unlikely alliance of traditionalists and hippies across education and social sciences who decried the untested effect of technology on youth.
Her latest polemic is targeted at someone like me, a mother of a modern girl. I have, apparently, done it all wrong. My baby daughter went to nursery so I could go back to work. Now she is seven, there are princess outfits in the dressing-up box, Barbies in her toy box, and she has a practised iPad “swipe.” I look at her and see a girl lucky to live in a loving home. Palmer sees a girl pretty much like the one in the Edinburgh café: on the path to promiscuity and low selfesteem.
According to 21st Century Girls, I could have averted this by turning back the clock, back to the time of Palmer’s own childhood, the 1950s, which she views as the golden era.
I start by asking Palmer why the girl in the café alarmed her. She says society as a whole is too complacent. Princess dresses are the slippery slope to Paris Hilton. “When I looked at her, I saw someone who has been reared in a commercialized environment in which it is all about yourself as a product. She has probably been part of a tween culture of fashion, makeup and shopping. Increasingly, children eight or younger are on Facebook, which often amounts to a personal PR exercise. So this girl has got to be physically perfect, beautifully turned out, get all the right exam results, with the perfect CV. How do you maintain that?”
Don’t, I ask, boys also get burnt by the flammable mix of hormones and social media? “Girls have more tendency to compliance. If the compliance is with our society’s materialistic, aspirational quest for perfection, that puts them under enormous pressure from an early age.”
Palmer repeatedly insists that “for girls to have the best possible chance of a good childhood and a happy life” they need a mother at home with them full time “during the first two years at least.” But, if a woman is to have two children, that’s a good half-decade out of her career. “It’s a choice, isn’t it? Having it all was an unrealistic dream. If your choice is that you want to stay at home and be a mother, that may have repercussions in terms of a career. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Dads can step in as a second best, she says, grandmother as third. But the main thing is that girls are not subjected to nursery before the age of two or three. She states in the book that “for most girls, early institutionalized childcare increases the danger of developing a compliant, risk-averse mindset ... Even those who don’t exhibit symptoms in the short term may perform on a more ‘fragile’ stage in later life.”
It’s easy to be skeptical. There is a large body of evidence on the effects of nursery, and its conclusions are usually contradictory. Even harder to swallow, from a scientific standpoint, is “breastfed girls are less likely to have body-image problems in later life.”
“The big theme seems to be the two great drives for attachment and play. If you get those two, to do with care and love, you are more likely to be self-confident and resilient.”
Aren’t children in 2013 in the western world lucky? Fatal childhood diseases have all but been eradicated, teenage pregnancy and alcohol consumption are falling, and they get more education than ever. “They are materially very lucky. I think socially and emotionally they are at a disadvantage in many ways. They are often getting far less opportunity for play. Particularly for girls, fashion and trivia have been put in place of it. They have less time with loving adults.”
Studies show children now spend more time with both parents than at most points in the last century, despite the increase in the female workforce.
“That’s time when the kids should be out playing,” she says. “This is the big issue. There was a special time for childhood during the mid-20th century. That was when parents gave girls the same freedom as boys to play. ”
Faced with any threat, the cry used to be “lock up your daughters.” Should we now do the opposite, whatever the cost? You might not agree with Palmer, but she is onto something. Later I sneak a look at my sleeping daughter, cocooned in her fairy duvet, and dream of a life for her, playing in the mud.