Hey fellow im's.
Just a pondering question.
Today my daughter had a dress rehearsal for her dance class today. Setting up near her was a young girl aged between 9-11. She was of middle eastern apperance. When she took her jacket off i noticed she had dark hair all over her arms up to her shoulders and when she turned around it was all over her back as well.
My personal internal dialogue was very confused on how as a mother i would deal with this if it was my child. Do you do something about it or do nothing? we try and tell our girls that you are perfect just the way you are but on the other hand we know how nasty kids can be.
What would you do?
Hairy child
Hairy child
Posted in:
Kids
7 Replies
I absolutely would do nothing unless my daughter was complaining about it! Her family is probably quite used to body hair as it would as you say be a family/heritage trait. So it's probably not a big deal.
In my experience if a child is going to be teased it's not always the things you think it's going to be about. My son is very different, a close friend has half her face sunken in, my auntie is an amputee (from a young age), I can think of a 100 kids at school that were obvious targets for bullying, yet they weren't. I had nothing that made me stick out, but was picked on mercilessly.
You teach kids that there value comes from within and what they do, not by there outwards appearance. You deal with bullies by educating not by changing a child or adults appearance. Let's face it there are a lot of people out and about who have things they can't control by hair removal or otherwise, so I'd rather focus on changing other people's attitude to difference than trying to erase children's and adults differences!
There will be personal and social values at play and possibly cultural and religious as well. I support remaining natural, children especially girls should know in their heart their natural body is ok.
All kids have flaws and hair, they need to see this and know we're all different. I don't want to set the standard from primary school that we all have to have styled eyebrows, hair removed, flaws fixed. Its really important they know the difference between manufactured 'beauty' and natural bodies.
I think we need to get over our issues with hair in this country. When adults are commenting on a child's mono-brow, and Tweens feel they have to have a Brazilian we have a problem.
Time to lead by example as adults.
I know a blonde blue-eyed hairy girl. Her dad is a hairy mofo, we're talking Chewbacca pelt. She doesn't have an issue with it yet and I hope she never does, she's a beautiful girl.
Leave it. I would never allow my child to change herself in anyway to please others!! You need to teach your children self worth and the right values for them to know that they are beautiful in every single way and that it is okay to be different, it is okay to look different, to sound different and to be special in their own way. I would teach her that having that hair means she is special and to not have it there wouldn't make her, her... instead of being disgusted about the amount of hair this child has how about you see how special she is to not give a dam about how much hair she dose or doesn't have!!!
I wish we could just embrace our body hair without people turning their noses up. Certainly save me a lot of time (in the summer) removing it. Lol
As for this little girl, if it doesn't bother her, her mum probably doesnt want to make an issue out of it. She probably doesnt want to make her feel like there is something wrong about her. Her mum is probably just letting her enjoy her childhod without having to worry about vainty. I remember the wonderful years of being blissfully ignorant of societies weird obsession about bald bodies! Then I remember when I was a teenager and one of my friends said to me "omg you don't shave you box?" And i was like "wtf! I already have to shave my legs and armpits and now I have to take care of that too! AAARRGHHH!"
I think if it was my own child I would leave it until she wanted to do something about it and be totally open about it and find a solution when she was ready. :)
Sounds like you were pretty confronted by this child's body. It might be useful for you to reframe your question away from 'how should her parents handle it' to 'how should I handle my, and my daughters reactions?'
When my daughter asks questions about someone (eg "why's she so hairy" I just take a very casual non-judgemental tone, my standard answer is "because that's how her body's made, we're all made differently." That's usually the end of the discussion.