Pages from Ainsley, Perfect You, a book I wrote for my daughter. Steal this idea for Christmas, Please!

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Pages from Ainsley, Perfect You, a book I wrote for my daughter. Steal this idea for Christmas, Please!

Subscribe to my RSS feed and/or email subscription. You don't miss the rest of this series.

Maybe you'll recall, last year my daughter had this annoying habit of harassing me about a school lunch tray and Lunchables. I sent her a healthy lunch in a pink plastic lunch box. Every day she'd negotiate with me, If I clean up my room can I have a Lunchable? Can I take a Lunchable on the Field Trip?

Only every time I sent a Lunchable she didn't eat it - because the food sucks.

Then I'd be superannoyed because they cost 3 freaking dollars. The whole point of sending a lunch is economy and health. Lunchables violates everything a lunch should be. It's the Kindergarten status symbol, don't you know?

But, then I read Jen's, Lunch Box Mania, Keyword "Mania." She wanted to cut down on disposable items like baggies. Good point. She did all the environmental and cost analysis homework for me and even told me where to buy these Faux Lunchable trays.

Target for $3 each.

How's that for peer pressure? Ainsley's status symbol is a Lunchable and mine is an economically and environmentally friendly object that will allow me to feed my kid healthy food without incessant complaining.

Please God, don't let it take her 35 years to figure out how to choose your peer pressure for your own self-preservation and best interests.

I figured I'd buy two so one could be in the dishwasher and one could be at school. Of course, I should have factored in the brother and bought 4.

I am also concerned about plastics due to the research I've been doing on early and precocious puberty.

Unfortunately, the only metal child-sized drinking options conflicted with our branding rules - High School Musical (I promised she could have High School Musical everything when she's in High School. But, it's not called 1st Grade Musical or Primary Musical), Princess and Bratz - those were my choices. So, I opted for the Dora plastic thermos with the snack compartment on the bottom until I can find a thermos without implications. (Okay, that's a good point - the lunch box is also plastic.)

As you saw in the video, the Baked Cheetos are going to buy me a lot of peace, I think. Last year I was probably too strict on her lunch snacks. This was daddy's brilliant idea. It's only 100 calories. We bought the bulk box for $8.95 at Sams Club and there are 30 packages.

That's 6 weeks of family harmony and peace - what a bargain.

Empowering Girls: Lunchables

Potty Dance and YouTube Peer Pressure

Empowering Girls: Girls-Only Public School

Empowering Girls: Early Puberty

Precocious Puberty

You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

Go Bratz Go!

by Tracee Sioux

Perfection - it's the pervasive modern-day feminine Achilles heel and we're passing it down to our daughters according to The Supergirl Dilemma a report about the pressure girls today are under.

Girls feel strong pressure to be perfect, look perfect and behave perfect all the time.

And I don't feel this is something we can blame on men. When was the last time you heard a man exclaim, I can't be perfect! I can't be everything to everyone all the time! Um, Never.

No, this is not an external problem - it's an internal feminine problem stemming from MOTHERS.

{{{{{Gasp}}}}} I said it.

To illustrate why I think so, here's two quick references to mother's preoccupation with perfection in our current feminine dialogue: Christine Fugate writes in the foreword of her new book, The Mothering Heights Manual for Motherhood Volume 1,

Over one hundred essays poured in from 26 states and four countries. Reading the essays shed light on the current state of the mom-mind. For example, the word 'perfect' (of a variation of it) was used over 92 times. That's almost one 'perfect' for every mom. While I think the questioning of perfection is positive (although not every essay questioned it), the frequency shows that the desire to be 'perfect' continues to loom over our sense of identity.

In The Feminine Mistake, Leslie Bennetts writes,

All too many American women are in thrall to increasingly deranged ideals of perfection. We live in a culture that constantly exhorts us to improve ourselves - and that assumes the perfectibility of virtually everything. If you don't like your nose, get a nose job! If you don't like the color of your hair, dye it! If your thighs are lumpy have liposuction! If you want abs of steel, go to the gym! Personal maintenance has become a national obsession that consumes a staggering amount of energy and resources; if American women put even a fraction of the time they spend on their appearance into working or social and political change, this country would be utterly transformed.

The Supergirl Dilemma, the report we discussed on Friday about gender stereotypes by Girls Inc., does not ignore the influence of adults in the girls' perceptions of what is important.

It's no surprise that the adult women - mothers and nonmothers included - answers to the questions mirrors the girls' answers to the questions.

True, People think that girls care a lot about shopping, 92% of the women said.

True, girls are under a lot of pressure to please everyone, 84% of the adult women said.

True, Girls are under a lot of pressure to dress the right way, 89% of the the adult women said.

What's fascinating is that women were much more likely than men to say they disliked that these stereotypes are true. Women are also more likely than the girls to say they disliked that these stereotypes are true - by a lot.

One reads the women's answers to the questions about girls and wonders if they aren't really answering what it was like for themselves as girls.

Perhaps because the women themselves are caving under the pressure of being perfect?

Our daughters emulate us, especially emotionally.

As in most reports about girls there's a lot of talk about media influence and pressure.

I'm definitely interested in helping Ainsley resist media pressure - but, who is helping her resist internalizing my feelings of being under pressure?

I'd like to see a report about how the media - television, marketing and advertising - is impacting mothers.

Are mothers figuring out how to deal with The Onslaught about women's bodies and sexuality, or are we internalizing it in an unhealthy way and then passing that onto our own daughters?

How are mothers going to resist media pressure that tells us we're never good enough?

If we can get right with ourselves, learn to accept our own selves in our imperfect states, and let this perfection pressure go, nothing will be able to hold our empowered daughters back.

If not. . . well, there's a lot of pressure to be perfect and I don't have to tell you how that feels - you already know.

Empowering Girls: Criticize Daughters' DNA

My Face/Her Face

Self-Loathing Sin Bank
Empowering Girls: Marketing Boundaries

APA Reports Sexualization of Girls Devastating

Math: It's A Tie

The Olympics are always an exciting time, to see those teenagers and early adults become the best in the world. It's awe-inspiring.

I want to do that! Ainsley said about her newest Heroine Gou Jing Jing.

Those children train every day from the time they are 3 years old for hours and hours. They don't go to regular school, they practice and practice and practice every single day. Their parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on training, I told her.

Oh, I don't want to do that, she said.

All that sacrifice - of youth, of fun, of childhood - makes me want to cry when one of them gets injured at the last minute and can't compete, like poor Chellsie Memmel whose ankle was injured and then she fell from the parallel bars during the qualifying round.

Listening to the bios you realize that, at least at first, shooting for the Olympics is a parental dream. Or, in the case of China, the State's dream.

Some of the Chinese girls were required to leave their family lives to train for the Olympics because they were inherently extra bendy and flexible or showed innate swimming skills when young.

Some say this is unfair, but my husband says, they were saved from a life of being farm or factory workers.

He has a point.

Some of the American athletes have parents who were Olympians. Mom or Dad won Gold - talk about pressure.

On the bios I heard that many of these teenage girls left their homes to train and one admitted that she has no friends outside the team.

What do you think? Does watching the Olympics make you want to sign your kid up for some hard core training?

It started to rain. The kids wanted to play in it. I went to make sure there was no lightening.

Come out in the rain with us Mommy.

I did. It felt lovely.

Then the little one came at me with a mud clod and threw it at me.

Laugh or lecture?

Before 3, everything they do is so adorable, I couldn't help but laugh.

I remembered a multitude of mud fights out at my grandmother's house in Utah. We would have the best time, my brothers and cousin and I, hurling mud at each other.

I do like mud.

It stopped raining so we turned on the sprinkler.

This is how Daddy found us when he came home from work.

Covered in mud.

We ran to a group shower to hose ourselves down and wash our hair.

I don't know if Ainsley's white shirt will ever come clean - it's been soaking in Oxyclean for a few days.

Dutch Blitz has some body image issues. She used to be a size 15 and she still feels unacceptably fat sometimes, though the scale and the tag in her clothes tell her she's not. I know this because I've read her very honest and poignant blogs about her feelings about her body. She wrote a A Letter To My Body about the betrayal girls and women can feel when their bodies defy expectations.

She wrote one called Thinner that I found particularly insightful in regards to empowering daughters.

It does no good to tell a woman "don't feel this way." I don't know why, it's just not effective. It does no good to tell a daughter, "don't feel this way." People get all proprietary about their feelings, like they have a right to them - negative ones and all.

Dutch Blitz knows there is "no good reason" to feel like crap about her very small, very socially acceptable, very healthy, very functional, perfectly-good body. But, she does anyway, 15% of the time.

"I struggle. I wish that I didn’t," Dutch Blitz writes. "I wish that the eighty-five percent became one hundred percent. That I could exude confidence and comfort. That I could stop looking at myself in such a harsh light. I want to be an example to my daughter.Then I think that maybe I am. Maybe, in my insecurity, I can show her that I am human too. That I see all of the pressure that is put onto women. That I, too, succumb to it sometimes."

The beautiful part about it is that she knows her negative body feelings are illogical and self-defeating and she's working her way out of it. She acknowledges the impact her poor body image will have on her daughter. But, she also acknowledges that adapting yet another standard of perfection, "how we must feel about ourselves," isn't much help to her daughter.

If we tell our daughters "beauty doesn't matter at all," they look at all the evidence around them and know that it's a lie or a delusion. "Don't have body issues," isn't a particularly effective strategy.

Beauty doesn't matter, beauty shouldn't matter.

Whatever.

We know that in a million ways it does. Our daughter's know it too. We're all suseptable to marketing and we all fall prey to the beauty ideal in some degree in our darkest moments.

To lie about those moments to our daughters will only make us less credible. To claim to be completely oblivious of beauty will backfire because they won't trust our perception of the world.

Even if we don't have a particularly negative self-image, we still mutter about someone's baby that is so cute or whether we think a dress pretty.

They know, whether we acknowledge it or not, that who is pretty is the same as who is popular. By preschool, they are they are assessing who is nice and who they like in terms of who is prettiest.

We don't live in isolated bubbles. And if we did most of us would opt for one that is pretty.

Beauty matters so much, in fact, that it can affect one's job performance and their future income. To pretend that it doesn't, makes our daughters stop trusting us.

We are imperfect and that is OK, appears to be Dutch Blitz's message to her own daughter.

I think Dutch Blitz is right to believe she'll have more success with the strategy of honesty.

Perhaps you noticed that your daughter has both a vagina and a uterus when she was born?

Oddly, this causes discomfort in some parents.

I admit to some discomfort in myself when I deal with rashes, itchy or irritation in the general area. As our daughters get older the issues surrounding their feminine organs and parts becomes more complicated. As far as parental discomfort regarding these reproductive issues - it's time to get over it.

Jeanne Connor Dessert has suffered from endometriosis since she was a young teenager. She currently runs a support group for women with endometriosis and she has some fantastic advice to parents of daughters.

I’m 39 years old and my endometriosis symptoms began at age 13. I was not properly diagnosed, however, until the age of 23.

I would like to make all parents of girls out there aware that endometriosis is a serious illness and that symptoms should not be overlooked, marginalized, or viewed as “in a girl’s head”.

Endometriosis is a very real illness that affects an estimated 80 million patients worldwide. Society has taught women and girls that menstrual pain is “normal”. It is not. Endo has a wide variety of symptoms. Cramps are just one of a great many. click on Endometriosis Association “what is it?” for a complete list of symptoms.

The important point I’d like to make is that if you think there’s any chance your daughter is having endo symptoms… I urge you to take it seriously, have her seen by a highly skilled gynecologist highly trained in recognizing and surgically removing endometriosis, and advocate for your daughter. This illness can cause pain (sometimes debilitatating and disabling), infertility, less commonly it can cause bowel obstruction. The list goes on. Endo patients are also at an increased risk for ovarian cancer, melanoma, and breast cancer.

If you have endo in your family (which some people do have family history without even knowing it due to societal “taboos” regarding talking about reproductive organs and menstruation), then your daughter has a higher risk of developing endo. I urge parents to learn the basics about endo. If your daughter has it, you want to be proactive, have her see a properly qualified gynecologist, and not ignore her symptoms. Empower your girls to obtain appropriate health care and not be cast aside by a health care system that isn’t doing all it should for endo patients.

Also, the research dollars for endo have historically been far too limited and I do not think this is an accident. Since this illness affects women and girls, the research dollars are just not as available for it as they would be for an illness affecting both genders.

I'm taking the kids to see their first former-President/future first-gentleman (is that the male derivative of First Lady?) today!

Yes, that would be Bill Clinton!

It is thrilling to me that I will have the opportunity to vote for the first female Presidential Candidate.

Taking the daughter out of school for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

What is more empowering than democracy? Nothing.

Very exciting. I hope it will make her feel like politics is accessible to her throughout her life. I hope she'll always feel like her voice counts. I hope to instill in her a sense of power and responsibility in democracy.

by Tracee Sioux

Have you seen that show Honey We're Killing the Kids? The show you a family with terrible eating habits, fast forward what they'll look like when they're 40 and predict their life expectancy?

Of course they pick families with such terrible habits you can walk away feeling like you're doing a super parenting job just because you introduced fruit.

For a better indication of how you're doing you can take the RealAge Healthy Kids Test. Dr. Mehmet Oz and Dr. Michael Roizen you know, from Oprah and YOU: The Owner's Manual: An Insider's Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger have put together a Healthy Kid quiz. You can enter your kids' nutritional information, exercise habits, computer and television screen time, academic and social exposure and it will give you a score between 1 and 10.

It will also tell you how old your child will feel when they are 30 if they keep up the habits you're teaching them. For instance, When Ainsley is 34 she'll feel only 30 if she keeps her current habits through her lifetime.

It will then give you advice on where you need to make improvements. Ainsley got an 8 which put us above average in the kids' health department. (Zack got a perfect 10, I wonder why when most of my answers were the same?)

We need to work on flossing and visiting the dentist, having more dinners together, swim lessons and stress management to improve our score.

by Tracee Sioux

Maybe you're one of the people who disagree with me politically. Maybe you like the current health care system, don't have a problem with current employment policy, would love to see Row V. Wade overturned. In other words, maybe you're a Republican.

Okay, I can respect that. Almost everyone I know and love is a Republican. I grew up Mormon and married a Texan. Very Republican both.

As an advocate for girls let me make the following plea on behalf of your daughter:

Please, please, please speak respectfully of the one and only female candidate ever for President of the United States - Hillary Clinton.

What you say about Hillary Clinton has the potential to translate to your daughters as your opinion of all women (including your daughter) seeking power.

I vividly remember asking my parents what the Equal Rights Amendment was as a child. I remember them telling me that it was a bill to make women equal to men. And they were voting against it.

Here's how that translated to a six-year-old girl: My parents are voting against ME! Why would they do that?

What you might say instead of I Hate Hillary Clinton! might be, I think a woman would make a wonderful President, I just don't agree with this particular woman's political views on health insurance.

It would be helpful, for your daughter, to avoid vague negative statements about Hillary's suitability as a role model for girls. Instead you could say, I think it's wonderful that a female has gotten this far in American politics. It's wonderful that women are becoming more powerful and ambitious. I just don't agree with her views on abortion or the economy.

If you minimize and criticize the significance of Hillary's presence in this race you minimize and criticize your daughter's potential.

It's Super Tuesday: Take your daughter to vote with you and show her what being empowered in a democracy means.

I love the concept of allomothering, especially for daughters.

Allomothering is non-maternal infant care.

It usually refers to fathers, aunts, grandmothers or siblings of an animal caring for and nurturing it while mommy takes a break or goes out foraging.

While you'll never hear me say anyone can take the place of Mommy, there are benefits of providing as much exposure to other family members, friends, and caretakers and babysitters as possible. There are obvious benefits of allowing a child to be surround by many people who love them.

There are also benefits for girls to see how other women live and think. Women have been in dramatic transition in the last 30 years and different women have reacted in various ways.

Exposure to the different choices women make can only benefit daughters. There is no right or single way to be a woman - more choices for daughters is what I'm after.

If girls only see the one way their own mother's live out their chosen roles we rob them of exposure to all the other choices.

I believe there are also generational hangups that will take more than a single generation of women to iron out or correct. I'm hoping that Ainsley won't have such terrible guilt about working outside the home if that's where her dreams take her. I don't necessarily want her to work fulltime at an office, but any terrible guilt is is an undue burden I don't want to put on her.

Ainsley is quite lucky in that she has many women who are more than willing to allomother her. She has two sets of grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, family friends, even three sets of great-grandparents.

My parents are coming to stay with the kids while I jaunt off with my man on a business trip to Atlanta for 5 whole days. I love that my parents are willing to do this and I love that Ainsley will have the attention, love, affection and interaction of others.

Exposure to a different way of doing things is healthy for girls to experience.

by Tracee Sioux

Did you catch the premier episode of Lifetime's How to Look Good Naked?

I think there is enough evidence that body image is, at least partly, emotionally-inherited.

When mothers feel bad about their bodies, daughters are more likely to feel bad about their bodies. (There are always exceptions, of course.)

Nothing is going to change the fact, however, that mothers being critical about our bodies puts daughters in a more vulnerable position self-image-wise.

How is a daughter to stand up to the onslaught of negative messages about a normal woman's body in this highly sexualized and beauty-conscious culture, if Mom can't learn to love her own body and cut herself some slack?

The problem is self-perpetuating. Mom criticizes self, daughter criticizes self and grows up to become mom who criticizes self.

Women need to get proactive about their own self esteem. It takes work to develop and maintain a self esteem. We need to be honest that self-loathing internal chatter is getting us no where.

Enter metro-homosexual Carson Kressly to help us solve our self-esteem issues. Whatever it takes, right?

I was very pleased with the first episode of How to Look Good Naked. While this appears to be a make-over show it is about making over a woman's insides - her self image. Let's face it, women, as a collective-conscious seem to need an internal self image makeover. A lot of us feel like crap about ourselves and that has a negative impact on our daughter's self image and self esteem.

One particular exercise was brilliant. Three women were shown on a monitor walking down the street. One was dressed in a slouchy over-sized sweater, one was in a boring office outfit and another was in a confident, sexy dress. The woman with poor body image was asked to identify the one that weighed most. She chose the one wearing over-sized clothing. What was revealed was that they were all the same woman. It was only her clothing - screaming about her confidence level - that made others think she was the most overweight.

While this is only a television program, it does seem logical to me that we might expect a cultural cure to a cultural problem. In other words, if we can feel better about ourselves while watching such a program - then we should watch it and implement some of the feel-good psychology suggested.

When we feel good about who we are and what we look like - well that translates into a health self image for our daughters. Which, to my mind, is totally worth the effort.

We all know our own flaws, and recognize them in our children, if we have any self-perception.

I was struck by this paragraph in Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesiaby Elizabeth Gilbert, I'm never going to be a wallflower, but that doesn't mean I can't take a serious look at my talking habits and alter some aspects for the better - working within my personality.

Yes, I like talking, but perhaps I don't have to curse so much, and perhaps I don't always have to go for the cheap laugh, and maybe I don't need to talk about myself quite so constantly. Or here's a radical concept - maybe I can stop interrupting others when they are speaking.

Wow, she must have really harnessed the Divine if she can control all that. I would add to that tone. I want to be able to say that I can control the tone of my voice. And that my daughter can control hers.

I know I've written about my tone before. My tone turtle idea, making us pay a quarter for every time we use a tone, didn't work out because she has no quarters and no concept of money. Many of you find my tone amusing - as do I, which is the core of the problem. It gets laughs - I like making people laugh. I find it instantly gratifying and validating.

I often refer to my tone as Angry Turrets Syndrome. Because it feels like something out of my control. The key here is that it feels like Angry Turrets Syndrome - in reality it is something that I need to learn to control. I've recently discovered that with much effort and a lot of meditation, praying and practice I can control anything, even the way I feel.Did everyone else already know you can control your feelings? It's a bit of a 2006-2007 Revelation for me.

It doesn't matter how I got my tone - let me just say, I come by it honestly. My tone is justified most of the time. My ego needs to know that. I have every right to be upset when I am upset. My ego needs to know that too. But, I choose to give up the tone anyway.

It's time to give it up. It's not getting me what I want. When something is ineffective then it's time to try something else. But, what if I'm not funny anymore?

I've got a lot of incentive to change this aspect of my self. My daughter has taken up my tone - for laughs - to be a disobedient little hooligan - to get her way - to push Mommy's buttons. The other day her friend went home because she didn't enjoy being treated so rudely. It won't be long before she becomes brazen enough to use it with teachers and other authority figures.

In 2008 I WILL get control of my tone and I will insist Ainsley get control of hers. I will not beat myself about the head with self-loathing or punishment when I fail. This is an emotional habit. Habits are terribly difficult and painful to break. But, if I can break the habit of smoking, I can break this habitual tone. I will give myself the whole year to do it and I will cut myself some slack in the midst of it. I will be kind to myself and I will expect kindness from others.

I'm going to start with How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talkby Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. I find my tone increases the more frustrated I become with my children and my husband. Perhaps if I have better communication tools I won't become as frustrated. Does anyone else wonder how you make the OTHER communication partner actually respond the way they're supposed to when using these books?

Most recently we've developed a pattern where I kindly ask her to do something four times and then the fifth time I get angry and raise my voice. Only after I yell does she respond.

You don't have to yell at me!
Oh, Really? When I asked nicely 4 times you ignored me! Apparently I DO have to yell at you!

This must stop.

Tone is my parenting and personal New Year's Resolution - what's yours?