IN MY VIEW

WHEN you look at your teenage daughter, what do you see?

The beauty of youth in all its quirky loveliness.

When your teen daughter looks at herself, what does she see?

Ten years ago, she might have seen the same as you, albeit a little more self-critically. Today, with self-lacerating eyes, she may well see only imperfection piled on imperfection.

She’ll spend hours mapping her own face and figure on to the faces and figures of female celebrities and reality television stars, and find herself wanting.

To such young women, “normal” isn’t only not good enough, it’s an affliction so intolerable that they’ll bankrupt themselves to afford what most of us would see as unnecessary and dangerous plastic surgery. Not even horror stories put them off.

Such is the longing to be “perfect”, the risks are worth it.

It’s easy to be horrified, even angry, that breast augmentation, the most popular procedure, has become almost as routine as fitting braces on teeth.

Why do young women really want to go under the knife?

There’s a one-word answer: pressure. Feeling pressure to look good is a fact of life for young women, but in the era of the selfie, the pressure is huge and never lets up.

Social media demands the constant uploading of pictures of yourself and these selfies aren’t a celebration, they’re a comparison.

Young women – and young men too, though in lesser numbers – feel competitively “on show” all day and all night.

It’s hard to know how to relieve a pressure which seems so obviously harmful.

In the end, the young women themselves will, with luck, feel able to ignore it, but meanwhile, those profiting from the insecurities of vulnerable young women need to examine not just their contracts but their consciences.

As for parents, we should tell our daughters they’re lovely just as they are. They won’t believe us, but say it anyway.