How Young Is Too Young?
Over dinner last Tuesday, my friend Beth showed me some pics of her adorable two-year-old niece. This little girl looks like a carbon copy of her mom, aunt and grandma, thanks to a gaggle of uber-strong genes. But among the physical traits this toddler has inherited – curly dark, dark brown hair, big brown eyes, ethereally pale skin – there is one problem feature rearing its stubborn head: A unibrow.
Beth is meticulous about maintaining her appearance and her brows are perpetually groomed to a T, so it’s not like she walks around looking like Bert from Bert and Ernie or anything. But Beth is a grown woman, and grown-woman beauty rituals like waxing, manicures, pedicures, Brazilians, and such are all fair game. Her niece, however, is still young enough to count her age in months. She thinks a dandelion is food and won’t learn how to pee in anything other than a diaper for a while still. The world is pure and innocent to her; to inflict the kind of pain that accompanies an eyebrow wax on her would be horrific. And yet, there it is: A single eyebrow, topping her gorgeous eyes like a thick squirt of mustard dressing up a hot dog. I’m not trying to be cruel – she’s a beautiful little girl and has a loving, emotional, laughter-filled family who worships her. But they also have noticed the eyebrow sitch and are worried. What will happen when other kids start to tease her? (And they will tease her – children make fun of each other for far less offenses than fuller-than-usual eyebrows.)
This hairy situation spring to mind when I read a recent story about the “new milestones” for young girls. Australian researcher Maggie Hamilton , author of What's Happening to our Girls, travels across her country talking about how the sexualization of young girls – which takes place all over, not just Down Under – is paving the way towards earlier-onset sexual behavior, things like sexting and oral sex.
We’ve all read the stories about 10-year-olds getting bikini waxes or preteens wearing thongs with suggestive sayings splayed across the crotch. More recently, Suri Cruise was spotted wearing high heels and Julia Roberts’ little girl was snapped getting a manicure. As the years go on, younger and younger girls are moving towards being mini-grown-ups. But where does one draw the line. Say your daughter gets her period at age 10, as many little girls (young women?) are now experiencing. That means she may have developed pubic hair by age nine. You don’t want her to be embarrassed or humiliated by classmates at, say, a public pool or pool party when they see a few hairs poking out from her swimsuit. On the other hand, you don’t want to expose her at such a tender age to awful pain, let alone the fact that bikini waxes have become so hypersexualized and fetishized that you’d be opening up a whole other Pandora’s Box. You also don’t want her to feel ashamed, like something is wrong with her. So what do you do? Leave it alone? Teach her how to use a razor? Nair? Is taking a blade to her skin or burning the hair off with chemicals better or worse than waxing?
And what about my friend Beth’s niece? If she’s already showing a genetic propensity for thick eyebrows at age 2, the issue’s clearly not going to resolve itself on its own and should only get worse by puberty. Should her parents just play dumb and risk the pain that surely will accompany the first hurtful comment she hears and understands? Or should they be proactive and, if so, what might that entail?
