Girls in the World

One of our biggest challenges as women is accepting ourselves, and when you’re raising daughters this stuff really comes to the fore, writes GH columnist Susan Hayden.

- Susan Hayden

This week something happened in our household that filled me with shock and dismay. Our eldest daughter got on the bathroom scale, froze, said, ‘Mom, I’m fat!’ and burst into tears. As a parent I’ve had many moments where I’ve felt like a failure, but never as painfully nor acutely as this one. And I don’t even know how this happened. For years the scale has been fun; something the girls hopped on and offof before or after their bath and excitedly announced the new number and how much they’d ‘grown’. But somehow, between then and now, those digits have taken on a new and not-so-fun significance.

And the worst part of all is that this child (young woman, really) is tall and thin, and while I try hard not to rate any body as ‘better’ than another, with her long dancer’s legs and beautifully lithe limbs she has exactly the physical dimensions our society deems beautiful. Having such a different body type from hers, I often watch her in admiration and (falsely, it turns out) imagine how wonderful it must feel to look so great without trying. I had no idea she was harbouring these feelings about herself. What happened to our sunny, supremely self-confident little girl?