Dear Prudence: My daughter is embarrassed by me

[cereta]

Q. Success through spandex?: I am a successful, work-from-home businesswoman who is an embarrassment to my tween daughter because I don’t look like the other moms at school. Specifically, I don’t wear Lululemon pants. She has asked me not to pick her up from school. How do I get my daughter to understand that her mom is a strong, respected, powerful woman whom she should be proud of? How do I get through to her that success isn’t defined by wearing the right brands but by having the respect of peers? Or should I just go buy myself a pair of Lululemons so she can have the respect of her peers?

A: This can’t be real. Can this be real? This can’t be real. And yet—anything that can happen … will happen. I have two suggestions: 1. Go full Auntie Mame and start picking up your daughter in ball gowns and ripped flannel and increasingly embarrassing costumes; teenagers can be painfully conservative, and this tendency ought to be gently teased right out of them. 2. Let her take the bus home. If she doesn’t like what the bus driver is wearing, she can try offering constructive criticism and see how other people welcome her input on their ensembles.

Comments

[cereta]

Basically, all of this, yes. I have to admit, as much as spouse and I joke about the small fanperson getting to a stage where she asks us to drop her off three blocks from school, I'm nervous about her (not-too-far-away) tweens. She's a sensitive kid, and has already had some serious clique issues and issues with peers thinking she's "weird." We've basically taken to trying to persuade her that "weird" means "creative and smart and interesting" (fortunately, we have many, many adults who reinforce that with her, because, well, we're weird and have weird friends ;). But we also recognize that it's going to take some cognitive and emotional development for that lesson to stick.

Which is just to say: yes, you have to tailor things to the kid.

[recessional]

Tweens are so hard - for both genders, just the bulk of boys go through it a couple years later and we, like . . .don’t see the shit they do to each other, somehow? Because we decide boys “don’t do drama” to the point of an almost Discworldian level absurdity that we fail to see it when it’s happening right under our noses.

But basically their brains suddenly make a HUGE LEAP in understanding social dynamics while still having the rest of the cognitive capacity and empathetic understanding and stuff as they had to start with, which is SO NOT SUFFICIENT to handle that social leap. Plus, you know, no experience! by definition.

And then we dump them together in a huge stew with some of the least adult help, supervision and intervention as they’ve ever had, and wonder why they all have emotional breakdowns. facehands So yeah, like there’s so much STUFF that can affect what exactly one needs to do - like the lululemon stuff could easily be classist crap the other girls are picking up from their parents (in a very non-nuanced way) and their peers and depending on the general social milieu this could be a non-issue or it could be indeed a huge issue affecting their social integration! (Because adults also suck. A friend-of-a-friend is stuck with this - being a lower-middle-class income with kids going to an upper-upper-middle-class private school because the mother works there, and there are real difficulties involved in making sure that the PARENTS don’t decide that her kids are People They Don’t Want In The House and thus tank the kids’ entire social arena . . . .)

But, like. Yeah. It’s big, it’s complicated, it’s all tangled up with adult stuff, and it’s being experienced by someone whose capacity for one kind of understanding is now genuinely too big for their capacity for other kinds to keep up.

My personal inclination would be to at least INCLUDE in anything else that one turns to in order to deal with it, honing in on “you know even if other people are judging people on the clothes they wear, it’s still a hurtful and even cruel thing to do, and you shouldn’t”, because that kind of empathic understanding is indeed one of the things that will fall out of the mental basket without help! But. Yeah. Just. Congrats: you have probably entered the most cognitively and emotionally difficult part of your child’s life and your experience as a parent. Invest in stress relief.

. . . not that this is an area of focal interest and concern for me or anything. cough

(Also: fingerscrossed for your daughter getting at least some kind peers, and while adults can't replace peers - unfortunately - the active support and involvement of admired adults can be a really really big boost/shield.)

[cereta]

Oh, she has a couple of really great friends who appreciate her creativity, for which we are thankful. And part of the strategy is reminding her that these girls do appreciate her, not necessarily as part of her sense of self-worth, but as reinforcement that the things she enjoys doing are perfectly fine activities, even if some kids find them odd. I'm really hoping these friendships persist through the tweens.

[recessional]

*FINGERS CROSSED*

[deird1]

My sister is currently teaching her 9 year old the "stuff em" principle: "They think I'm weird for watching this tv show!" "Stuff em! Watch what you want!"