Beate said:
I see a dilemma here: The need to counter society's negative messages with positive ones of your own conflicts, to my mind, with the risk that constant judgment of ANY kind will generate insecurities. I'm following the logic of Alfie Kohn's "Unconditional Parenting" when I say that the constant affirmation of Nat's intelligence may some day raise the question (from her or others) of why you're not just taking for granted that she's smart. And yet I see why it's necessary to counter outsiders' negative input. Frankly, I have no idea how I would handle this dilemma. It's a tough one.
Sara said:
I think that the right amount of affirmation is hugely helpful, but too much praise reeks of insincerity.
Sadly, one's mother's view of one's beauty is probably the message least valued by just about any child over the age of 10 ... I think that making sure that the message is reinforced from other directions might be really helpful.
I appreciate Beate's recognition of the dilemma. It's definitely a dilemma, and as Nat has grown older and has started getting wiser to the world around her, our handling of that dilemma has shifted. No doubt it will keep shifting as the need arises.
The bottom line is, there's no right answer to the problem, because it's a problem rooted in and expressed through white supremacy and racism, plain and simple. There's no antidote to racism that any one parent or any one family can achieve on its own. When Sara suggests the need to reinforce family opinion with outside opinion, she couldn't have hit the target any squarer. The trouble is, where do we find that outside opinion? Look around. Where are girls and women who look like Nat represented as intelligent and beautiful? (For extra credit, compile a list of places where they're represented as inherently ugly, stupid, behavior problems, sexually loose and/or rapable, poor, drug-addicted, and otherwise undesirable and pathological.)
The only place I've found reinforcement of positive images of dark-skinned, kinky-haired girls and women is in strong Black neighborhoods in major cities: On the street in DC or Chicago where Nat is set upon at every turn by gushing Black adults telling her she's gorgeous, at the Black feminist bookstore (alas the passing of Sister Space in DC when U Street gentrified and their rent got raised), in the natural hair salon like the one we visited with Uncle Wayne in Seattle, where I met a wonderful woman who works with One Church, One Child and talked with me about the value of homeschooling Black children. And so our goal is to live in a place like that sometime soon and be sure Nat is surrounded by a real community of real people who love her and value her.
Meanwhile, our little commnunity such as it is does its best. Much of our decision-making about taking Nat consciously to the mirror and pointing out her beauty in the specificity of her features comes through earnest conversations with Black parents who do this with their own children, and whose parents did it for them. "Direct socialization" as one mother of daughters put it for me, is almost the only tool we have to combat the negative messages that our children are bombarded with through indirect socialization. Telling my daughter her brown skin is beautiful does feel awkward to me. But that is the price of raising a Black daughter in the 21st century U.S. I don't have the luxury of following the no doubt good advice of child development experts that too much praise can be harmful. (I read that in Einstein Didn't Use Flashcards myself, and thought, "where the heck does that leave our family?" with our commensurate need to give Nat some kind of counter-message from a popular culture that tells her she can never be beautiful and she's unlikely to succeed educationally.
It leaves our family where Black families have always been in this country. It's another moment of realizing that we have lost some white privilege we didn't know we had.
The reason I'm writing this follow up is because I think many of my white readers have probably not thought of it that way. I know that before I was Nat's mother, the idea of making such a big deal out of a child's beauty and/or intelligence would have rung artifical to me too. But how do you think those little girls in that film came to see those white dolls as "nice" or "pretty" or otherwise desirable? And what can I, as a mere individual mother, do to combat that? This is one of the few tools I have with a child not yet 2 years old.
When Nat is older, we'll be able to let her pursue her heart's desires and give her all kinds of complex opportunities to learn to appreciate and love herself in complex ways. It's one reason I want to home school. I want to give her opportunities to have ideas, try them out, succeed and fail on her own terms and learn to try again without feeling defeated by classroom rules or grades.
I have read interviews with adult transracial adoptees who say they felt their parents didn't find them beautiful; that they had no memories of being told they were beautiful and how that messed with their sense of self-worth and how they interpreted it in racial terms. And if the worst thing Nat can tell her therapist about me someday is "my mother told me I was beautiful too much" well, I'll take it.
As Trey points out, there's too little praise and there's too much praise. It's a tough line to walk, but if I have to err, I'd rather err on the side of a child who bats her eyelashes at herself in the mirror and declares "pretty girl" any day of the week.
