by Tracee Sioux

When you write about issues effecting daughters, you put a lot of thought into personal action that might not have carried much meaning before.

For instance, having written that women should consider how their daughters will feel before reconstructing perceived flaws through surgery in My Face/Her Face I have to wonder how far I must take the you're beautiful the way God made you message.

Does that make it wrong for me to color my hair? Am I now restricted to only allow myself my natural color? Am I making Ainsley feel bad about her light brown hair (which is my natural color) by bleaching and coloring my hair? Am I harming her self esteem?

I was a natural blond as a child. I'm not over it. Okay? I'm just not. I want to be a blond. My hair got darker around the 5th or 6th grade and I wasn't thrilled when I saw myself in a picture. I've pretty much been bleaching it since the 7th grade. Blonds have more fun. Blonds are prettier. Blonds are younger. Blonds are more exciting. I think you look great as a brunette. But I, my inner self or my own internal picture of me, is a blond.

I don't feel as pretty if I don't have blond streaks. Sometimes I like to put red in it. Sometimes I really enjoy the contrast between the dark brown and the sun-streaked blond. Last Spring I loved my pink streaks amidst the blond. I like the feeling I get when I make a big change, but I like it most when there is blond involved.

I'll probably never develop a deep satisfaction in my natural color. For one thing, by now it's probably got some grey in it and I'd color it anyway. I may never get over it - and why should I? There is nothing permanent about hair.

However, after reading my friend Jennifer's blog A Free Haircut is Always a Super Cut arguing that professional hair color is an expensive luxury. I decided I could give up my blond - for a little while - to free up the $60 it costs me to have it done. We're buying a house and that 60 bucks, as well as the gym membership, can go to the mortgage.

I went for my natural Light Golden Brown first. Boring. Boring. Boring. I went back for the Dark Auburn last night - I can at least give myself a hint of drama.

And Ainsley, I've already colored her hair twice - once with pink streaks and once with red. She even had pink extensions glued in for a while. She asked for it and I couldn't think of a reason not to.

So, if Ainsley is going to get a message I hope it's this, You have the freedom to have whatever color of hair you want. You can reinvent yourself every season if you feel like it. But, keep it in perspective - if it's between buying a house or being a blond - the house should win every time.

Who knew I had this much to say about hair:

• Beauty & Reality
• Pink Hair Fiasco
• Pink Hair Fiasco Take 2
• Curl Maintenance
• The Meaning of Hair

This is a self portrait of a 1950s housewife. What do you see?

Thank You to my friend Cindy for allowing me to print her mother's work.

The American Psychologocial Association has published a Report of the APA Task force on the Sexualization of Girls.

This 74-page report should be required reading for every mother, mentor, and educator. It contains a multitude of studies and evidence that girls are being negatively effected by being inundated with images and innuendos in all facets of culture that sexuality them.

Sexualization defined as:

* Valued for sexuality rather than other characteristics.

* Being objectified, made into a thing to be used for someone else's sexual use versus rather than being seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making.

* Sexuality is inappropriately imposed on a person.

Ample evidence suggests that sexualization has negative effects in a variety of domains, including cognitive functioning, physical and mental health, sexuality and attitudes and beliefs, the report states.

* Cognitive and physical functioning. Perhaps the most insidious consequence of self-objectification is that it fragments consciousness. Chronic attention to physical appearance leaves fewer cognitive resources available for other mental and physical activities. One study had girls unable to do well on a math test if wearing a swimsuit versus a sweater. The boys were unaffected by their attire.

* Sexualization and objectification undermine comfort with one's own body leading to feelings of shame, anxiety and even self-disgust. Vigilant monitoring of clothing or appearance leads to increased shame about one's body.

* Frequent exposure to cultural beauty ideals in the media has been shown to be associated with poor mental health including eating disorders, depression and low self-esteem.

* Studies show a link between sexualization and physical health. Girls who reported feeling negatively about their bodies were more likely to smoke and less likely to participate in sports or athletic activities.

* Frequent exposure to narrow ideals of attractiveness leads to narrow ideas about actual feminine bodily experiences like breastfeeding, menstruation, sweating and real sexual experiences.

* Frequent exposure to fictionalized images of sex made girls and women feel worse about real life sex.
Proposed solutions include:

* Formal education about healthy sexual and romantic relationships. Things like dating respect conferences.

* Comprehensive sex education in a human biology sense arms girls with the facts about their biological sexuality.

* Participation in athletics and extracuricular activities not of a sexual nature. Athletics that focus on stregth and competence increase self esteem.

* Religious and spiritual practices.

* Girl-centered groups and activities such as mentoring, Girl Scouts, and girl-related after school programs.

* Educating girls about how images in the media are produced and the profit motives behind advertising campaigns.

As a parent, mentor, woman, and journalist I find the findings of this paper to be consistent with what I'm seeing in girls and women.

Culture has meaning, the toys and clothes we allow our children to wear carry significance, the media they are exposed to has consequences. The statistical evidence suggests that perhaps we, as parents, are not taking it seriously enough.

It is my belief, and this is supported by the APA's report, that mothers are in the best and most appropriate position to impact a girl's self worth and to encourage a healthy sexuality. It's difficult to combat an entire culture with media images of sexuality, most of it inappropriate and disrespectful towards girls and women, invading nearly every facet of day-to-day-life.

It's difficult to draw the line and tune into warning signals our girls give us. My goal, and forgive me if I'm a fallible mother who finds the cultural and beauty myths difficult to interpret myself, is to give mothers a place where they can come and get a perspective that's a little different from the mainstream. Give mothers a place to sound off about cultural sexualization and how that's influencing their daughters. I intend to provide some tools to help mothers communicate with their daughters about sensitive issues.

It is our job, as parents, to interpret culture for our daughters.

by Tracee Sioux

I hate that I have to admit this. I really, really do. Like you don't even know how much it pains me to admit that . . .

My tone has become a problem. I know this because I hear my tone come out of my daughter's mouth and that's a problem. A really big problem.

I suppose I used to think of my tone as an effective way to make myself be heard. The problem is that it's not really effective anymore, if it ever was. Highly questionable whether my tone has ever gotten me what I really wanted. Perhaps I was just fooling myself there.

If I could legislate my daughter's tone, without having to admit that she's immitating me, believe me, I would jump on that.

However, if there is one thing the last 5 years of parenting has taught me, children are fantastic mimics. If you want to know how you look to others, look at your children. If you don't like what you see in the reflection, you have to trace it back to yourself and fix the root of the problem. Otherwise the problem just gets worse and far more out of control.

My daughter's tone stopped being cute about a little while ago. She's 5. I'm 34. So, this stopped being cute what, like 29 years ago?

All my life I've heard this, You have an attitude problem.

To which, I've replied, if only in my own head, I have an attitude, I wouldn't say it's a problem.

For the past little while confronting some issues in my marriage I've realized that my tone goes a long way in creating the problems. To admit that takes a lot of courage because I don't want this to construed as "a get out of jail free" card. But, tone does go a long way. Tone, I've realized and have had several people point out to me, is often more important than what you're actually saying.

So, if people are only hearing the tone and not the message I'm trying to convey - well, that's a problem. It's ineffective.

I don't know what the solution is. Step One, in breaking any habit, behavior or addiction is always, admit that you have a problem.

My tone is a problem. OUCH! It's painful to admit.

I've got several solutions in the hopper too. The A Complaint Free World bracelet is a good reminder that I don't have to complain about everything. (Although, it's kind of hurting my self-esteem because I am such a failure at not complaining.) I've installed a Tone Turtle Bank, in the same spirit as the Self Loathing Sin Bank, on the kitchen table. The idea being that my daughter and I must deposit quarters into the banks to penalize tone usage. (The obvious problem with this penalty is that she has no job and has to get the quarters from me. So, it's a theory in progress.)

Most importantly, I think, is that I took it to God and surrendered my anger and my tone.

Of course, as is my nasty emotional habit, I trace all my negative behaviors back to my mother - which is totally unfair as I'm 34-years-old and must be responsible for my own shit eventually, right?

Really, the fear of Karma (by which I mean, what comes around goes around and do unto others and you get back what you put out there) is getting to me. I'm totally aware that if I keep blaming my mother for all my personal crap, then my daughter will have cart blanche to blame me for everything and I'm not at all into that. I'm doing the best I can here. As Iknow my mother did too.

So, I took all my issues with my mother straight to God and surrendered those too.

If I thought I could get away with it, I wouldn't have told her she had the option of cheerleading. She's too smart to fall for that kind of crap. Instead, I listed the options.

She gave me a sly smile, knowing I would disapprove, and said, I want to do the cheerleading.

Have you ever wondered why girls should be cheering for boys, but boys don't cheer for girls? Do you think that's okay?

Mama, when I went to watch Eric play basketball Emma was cheering for a girls' basketball team.

Are you sure?

Well, you weren't there, but they had girls playing basketball and I think Emma was cheering for that team.

Do you think it's fair that only boys are allowed to play football but girls stand on the side and cheer for them?

I don't even want to play football, she pointed out.

When Emma took cheerleading, she informed me, they didn't wear belly shirts, they wore long ones and I don't think they did anything imapropriate.

My husband didn't think it was a big deal. My friend thought I was being too extreme. Both pointed out that boys cheer these days too. The difference is, there are not entire scantily clad gangs of boys cheering for the girls' teams.

In the end, neither argument swayed me in favor of cheerleading. What did sway me is that my particular girl wants to try it. She thinks it will be fun.

I decided it would be more empowering for her to be able to make her own decision about which sport to try than it would be for me to forbid cheerleading on a feminist principle.

She's just a different kind of girl than I was. She's more of a girly kind and I was more of a tom-boy. But, I don't think it would be empowering to make her feel bad about being a girly-girl.

The more I thought about it, I could trace my negative feelings about cheerleading back to the time my parents told me we were moving again to a town with a small enough high school, where I could make it as a cheerleader.

Upset about the umpteenth move, there I stood dressed head-to-toe in black, pale skin, red lipstick totally Mod screaming, "Why would I want to be a cheerleader?" What I really wanted to articulate was, "Have we met? Do you know anything about me at all?"

So, to avoid a similar episode with my daughter, I'll acknowledge that she is the kind of girl who thinks being a cheerleader is fun. And I'm going to get okay with that.

I did some research and according to the Official Cheerleader's Handbook, cheerleading was invented at Princeton in the 1860s by men. They didn't let girls do it until the 1920s when they added gymnastics and tumbling at the University of Minnesota. It was World War II, and no boys being available, that transitioned the sport to where 90% of cheerleaders became female.